Since Apache is running as system user 'apache' and system group 'apache', I thought it sensible that hosted files be owned by that process.
# ls -l /var/www/html/ total 24 drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:37 default drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 10:01 phpinfo drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:41 slackbox-mail drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:37 slackbox-site drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:42 unixbox-mail drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:38 unixbox-site
Directories are all drwxr-x---, while files are -rw-r-----.
Now some guy on the french forum fr.centos.org told me that I got everything wrong, and that my setup is a security flaw, without elaborating any further though.
So I thought I'd ask on this list (which is a little bit more urbane than the french forum).
- What is wrong with my setup ?
Possibly what he means is that having the files and directories writeable by the process that the web server runs as is a security issue. i.e. if there are any security issues with httpd, or the code that runs on the sites, then without a privilege escalation the exploit would run as the apache user, which means that the exploit can write to those directories resulting at the least a defaced site or at worst the upload of a more problematic exploit.
- What do you suggest ?
Have as few directories/files owned by the web server process as possible. If you have an application that needs to write to a file or upload to a directory, then they do need to be owned & writeable by apache.
The files do need to be readable by the apache user, so the file permissions are usually 644 (with directories 755) and owned by root.root - although the actual owner doesn't matter so long as apache can read the files. I suppose if you are really paranoid, then set the owner to nobody.nobody
BTW, I don't mind to RTFM, even extensively.
There's lots of pages out there about hardening Apache and what file ownership and permissions the site should have. Everyone has their opinion and the defaults for different distros varies. But the underlying idea is that the web server files should not be owned by the process that the web server runs as.
P.