Keys to the Realm

For confidential data, you should always use a secure SSL connection. Before Hiawatha can speak https, you need an X509 SSL certificate, which you can either buy from a trusted third party (i.e., a Certificate Authority) or create yourself with the use of OpenSSL [2]. The commands to accomplish this are shown in Listing 2.

The result of this is a serverkey.pem file, which you need to store along with httpd.conf (typically in /usr/local/etc/hiawatha).

Https connections are typically directed at port 443; the web server thus needs to listen on this port and grab the certificate when it receives a request:

Binding {
   Port = 443
   Interface = 192.168.2.123
   UseSSL = yes
   ServerKey = /usr/local/etc/hiawatha/serverkey.pem
}

The preceding entry means that browsers can only use the https protocol to set up a connection to Hiawatha by way of port 443; in this example, the result would be https://192.168.2.123:443. Additionally, the certificate is only valid for the specified port and interface combination. To use it for all secure connections, put the last line behind the closing bracket.

Figure 2: With support from a PHP interpreter, major portal packages like Joomla will run on Hiawatha – even faster than on Apache.

Mutual Liability

CGI programs are popular targets for attackers, possibly because they are buggy, or because the developer has been lazy with respect to security. To prevent CGI programs from running amok and even taking the web server down, Hiawatha can use a CGI wrapper to confine them. The wrapper will give CGI programs a different user ID if needed.

To set up the jail, you first need to select a directory as your CGI root; the CGI root directory contains all CGI programs and scripts. To match Listing 1, the directory could be /usr/local/var/www/hiawatha/cgi. The wrapper will only run CGI programs and scripts from this directory.

Next you need another configuration file called cgi-wrapper.conf. This file resides in the same directory as httpd.conf – that is, /usr/local/etc/hiawatha. The Hiawatha archive includes a sample of cgi-wrapper.conf with all the lines commented out.

The cgi-wrapper.conf first tells the wrapper what programs it is allowed to run outside the CGI root directory. The list of permissible programs might include interpreters for the script languages you use:

CGIhandler = /usr/bin/php5-cgi
CGIhandler = /usr/bin/perl

Note that CGIhandler is not a good choice of name because this setting has very little in common with the identically named setting in httpd.conf. Once you have configured the wrapper, you can lock away your CGI programs:

Wrap = wrap_id; /usr/local/var/www/hiawatha/cgi; tim

The name of the jail is at the start of the line. Because you will need to add this name to your httpd.conf file, you need to keep it in mind. Following the first semicolon, you have the name of the CGI root directory and then finally the username (or ID) under which CGI programs will be running. If the directory name contains a pipe symbol, as in the following line,

Wrap = wrap_id; /usr/local/var/www/hiawatha|cgi; tim

the CGI wrapper will use the part before the pipe as a chroot directory and put everything else into this environment. In this case, you will need to make sure the CGI handlers are available in the chroot directory.

The CGI wrapper is now ready to rumble, and you just need to tell Hiawatha to use it by adding the following to the httpd.conf file:

WrapCGI = wrap_id

You can define multiple wrappers in cgi-wrapper.conf and then use them for different virtual hosts (see the "Virtual Hosts" box).

VirtualHost {
    WebsiteRoot = /var/www/anothersite/wwwroot
   Hostname =    www.myvirtualsite.com
        ...
}

PreventCMDI = yes

PreventCSRF = yes

PreventSQLi = yes

PreventXSS = yes

Typography

A final treat is UrlToolkit, which works similarly to the Apache server's mod_rewrite. Each URL the web server reads is compared with predefined patterns. In the case of a match, Hiawatha will perform a predefined action. Any regular expression can serve as a test pattern [2]. Listing 3 gives a small example.

Listing 3 looks far more cryptic than it actually is. The listing defines two rule sets. The ToolkitID for the upper rule set is varioustests, whereas I called the second one secret. The varioustests rule set first checks to see whether the URL starts with /php/. If this is the case, Hiawatha stops all further tests with this rule set (Return). If not, it checks to see whether the URL starts with index.php4. In this case, Hiawatha replaces the string with /index.php; that is, it drops the 4 in the file name.

The second rule set, secret, starts by calling its colleague varioustests (Call) and then refuses access to the /secret subdirectory. Table 1 gives an overview of possible actions.

After specifying rules in httpd.conf, you only need to tell the web server which rule set to use:

UseToolkit = secret

Listing 4 shows the complete Hiawatha configuration.

Conclusions

Besides the security functions described in this article, Hiawatha has a number of other clever capabilities. For example, the web server has a more intelligent approach to Gzip compression than its colleagues, and it gives you the option of an internal error handler. If the client requests an XML file and the matching XSLT file exists, Hiawatha will automatically perform XSL transformation if needed. If the execution speed of CGI scripts is too slow, you can enable the FastCGI mechanism. Hiawatha also has a good understanding of access privileges for directories. You can even throttle the upload speed for specified file types.

If you would like to know more about Hiawatha, check the slightly terse HowTo [2]. The HowTo even discusses the option of combining the web server with AppArmor and Grsecurity [3].