I started writing a longer post about the so-called shell shock, with analysis of what makes a web server vulnerable or secure.  Or, strictly speaking, not a webserver, but a platform an attacker might access through a web server.  But I’m not sure when I’ll find time to do justice to that, so here’s the short announcement:

I’ve updated mod_taint to offer an ultra-simple defence against the risk of shell shock attacks coming through Apache HTTPD, versions 2.2 or later.  A new simplified configuration option is provided specifically for this problem:

    LoadModule taint_module modules/mod_taint.so
    Untaint shellshock

mod_taint source and documentation are at http://people.apache.org/~niq/mod_taint.c and http://people.apache.org/~niq/mod_taint.html respectively.

Here’s some detail from what I posted earlier to the Apache mailinglists:

Untaint works in a directory context, so can be selectively enabled for potentially-vulnerable apps such as those involving CGI, SSI, ExtFilter, or (other) scripts.

This goes through all Request headers, any PATH_INFO and QUERY_STRING, and (just to be paranoid) any other subprocess environment variables. It untaints them against a regexp that checks for “()” at the beginning of a variable, and returns an HTTP 400 error (Bad Request) if found.

Feedback welcome, indeed solicited. I believe this is a simple but sensible approach to protecting potentially-vulnerable systems, but I’m open to contrary views. The exact details, including the shellshock regexp itself, could probably use some refinement. And of course, bug reports!