Description as given by Josh Richards: A security hole exists in the nph-test-cgi script included in most UNIX based World Wide Web daemon distributions. The nph-* scripts exist to allow 'non-parsed headers' to be sent via the HTTP protocol (this is not the cause of this security problem, though). The problem is that nph-test-cgi, which prints out information on the current web environment (just like 'test-cgi' does) does not enclose its arguments to the 'echo' command inside of quotes....shell escapes are not possible (or at least I have not found them to be--yet) but shell *expansion* is.... This means that _any_ remote user can easily browse your filesystem via the WWW. This is a bug with the nph-test-cgi script and _not_ the server itself.
Description as given by Josh Richards: A security hole exists in the nph-test-cgi script included in most UNIX based World Wide Web daemon distributions. The nph-* scripts exist to allow 'non-parsed headers' to be sent via the HTTP protocol (this is not the cause of this security problem, though). The problem is that nph-test-cgi, which prints out information on the current web environment (just like 'test-cgi' does) does not enclose its arguments to the 'echo' command inside of quotes....shell escapes are not possible (or at least I have not found them to be--yet) but shell *expansion* is.... This means that _any_ remote user can easily browse your filesystem via the WWW. This is a bug with the nph-test-cgi script and _not_ the server itself.