[campsite-support] Reports of security vulnerability in Campsite: Our response
  • Dear Campsite users,
    In
    recent days various reports have appeared on security-oriented websites
    such as vupen.com, securityfocus.com and Spamfighter.com regarding
    Campsite's vulnerability to cross-site scripting attacks.Because we take security very seriously, these reports were alarming to us too.
    However,
    the reports focus on a vulnerability that has been documented for a while now by the PHP development team, and is not in Campsite itself, but is a setting
    for the PHP programming language, not necessarily in Campsite. It is a
    setting in the document php.ini, called register_globals, and our recommendation is that it should
    always be set to 'off.'The Campsite manual explicitly warns users about this:
    http://manual.campware.org/manuals/campsite/3.3/index.php?id 0
    To make this even clearer, as of the next Campsite release (3.3.2), the installation process will warn users about this setting during install, telling them that the recommended value for register_globals is OFF to avoid big security holes.While
    we appreciate having people point out security holes to us (and please keep
    those bug reports coming!), we wish there was a way that the security
    sites would also acknowledge when such vulnerabilities are resolved. Unfortunately,
    there doesn't seem to be such a way right now, except to try to address
    it directly via the Campware site and mailing lists.
    Best regards,The Campsite team
  • 1 Comment sorted by
  • Hello Douglas,

    Wednesday, July 29, 2009, 9:28:10 PM, you wrote:

    DAmo> While
    DAmo> we appreciate having people point out security holes to us (and please keep
    DAmo> those bug reports coming!), we wish there was a way that the security
    DAmo> sites would also acknowledge when such vulnerabilities are resolved. Unfortunately,
    DAmo> there doesn't seem to be such a way right now, except to try to address
    DAmo> it directly via the Campware site and mailing lists.

    Douglas, both security sites expect YOU as the software developers to
    personally go there/write them and update the status quo. That's - at
    least according to my knowledge - how everyone else is doing this.
    Neither vupen.com, nor securityfocus.com shows any reaction from
    campware. However, they would, if you did contact them, I've seen that
    multiple times with other software. Both sites are quite correct in
    manners and very punctilious.


    Cheers,

    Pippa