On Nov 5, 2013, at 6:28 PM, Nate Coraor <nate@bx.psu.edu> wrote:
Hi Ido,
Thanks for the feedback. Replies below.
On Nov 5, 2013, at 9:54 AM, Ido Tamir wrote:
This seems to happen often e.g. http://wiki.galaxyproject.org/DevNewsBriefs/2012_10_23#Compute_Tool_Security...
I'm not sure I'd agree that it's often - we've had 4 or 5 vulnerabilities over the life of the project. 2 allowed arbitrary code execution, the others were less severe.
But these were written by experts, not by people like me, that don't know what the galaxy framework really does/does not do with the input, so I guess I make many more mistakes.
a) are there general guidelines in the wiki on how to avoid these problems when creating tools?
The guidelines for writing a Galaxy tool are no different from best practices for writing secure code. In specific for this vulnerability, execution of user input should be handled with extreme care, and this tool had some gaps in its input validation and sanitization. For what it's worth, the filter tool (on which the other vulnerable tools were based) is one of the few tools surviving from the very early days of Galaxy, and would not be implemented the same way if written today.
I think it would be nice to have a small outline on the wiki of what galaxy does with the input data and how it could affect a tool. What sanitisation is there by default so I don't have to worry about it, but what could happen I if I don't care to check/remove sanitise ' | or " ..., maybe with examples.
b) is there a way to check automatically if all input fields are correctly escaped in a tool?
I am not sure how Galaxy could do this. Galaxy sanitizes the command line so that input fields passed to a tool as command line arguments cannot be crafted to exploit the shell's parsing rules. Thats good
best, ido
What the tool itself does with its inputs are out of Galaxy's control.
--nate
A search for security in the wiki brings up: • Admin/Data Libraries/Library Security 0.0k - rev: 1 (current) last modified: 2013-01-02 23:54:33 • Admin/DataLibraries/LibrarySecurity 19.2k - rev: 4 (current) last modified: 2013-01-03 00:12:36 • HelpOnConfiguration/SecurityPolicy 1.9k - rev: 1 (current) last modified: 0 • Learn/Security Features 7.0k - rev: 3 (current) last modified: 2011-09-13 16:52:08 • News/2013_04_08_Galaxy_Security_Release 1.3k - rev: 3 (current) last modified: 2013-04-08 16:56:41
"escape" does not bring up anything.
thank you very much, ido
On Nov 5, 2013, at 12:45 AM, Nate Coraor <nate@bx.psu.edu> wrote:
A security vulnerability was recently discovered by John Chilton with Galaxy's "Filter data on any column using simple expressions" and "Filter on ambiguities in polymorphism datasets" tools that can allow for arbitrary execution of code on the command line.
The fix for these tools has been committed to the Galaxy source. The timing of this commit coincides with the next Galaxy stable release (which has also been pushed out today).
To apply the fix and simultaneously update to the new Galaxy stable release, ensure you are on the stable branch and upgrade to the latest changeset:
% hg branch stable
% hg pull -u
For Galaxy installations that administrators are not yet ready to upgrade to the latest release, there are three workarounds.
First, for Galaxy installations running on a relatively new version of the stable release (e.g. release_2013.08.12), Galaxy can be updated to the specific changeset that that contains the fix. This will include all of the stable (non-feature) commits that have been accumulated since the 8/12 release plus any new features included with (and prior to) the 8/12 release, but without all of the new features included in the 11/4 release. Ensure you are on the stable branch and then upgrade to the specific changeset:
% hg pull -u -r e094c73fed4d
Second, the patch can be downloaded and applied manually:
% wget -o security.patch https://bitbucket.org/galaxy/galaxy-central/commits/e094c73fed4dc66b589932ed...
and then:
% hg patch security.patch
or:
% patch -p1 < security.patch
Third, the tools can be completely disabled by removing them from the tool configuration file (by default, tool_conf.xml) and restarting all Galaxy server processes. The relevant lines in tool_conf.xml are:
<tool file="stats/dna_filtering.xml" /> <tool file="stats/filtering.xml" />
The full 11/4 Galaxy Distribution News Brief will be available later today and will contain details of changes since the last release.
--nate Galaxy Team ___________________________________________________________ Please keep all replies on the list by using "reply all" in your mail client. To manage your subscriptions to this and other Galaxy lists, please use the interface at: http://lists.bx.psu.edu/
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