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I am not at all convinced by the idea of giving permissions to read,write and
execute as these Learning Management Systems say.
Let me know what you people have to say?
What is the best practise in such situations?
James,
You are right that making these directories writable by the Web server or world-writable increases your security risk, since in many cases it allows escalating the ability to write to the filesystem to the ability to execute arbitrary code as your Web server user.
One option for mitigating this is to carefully configure the Apache-writable directories so they will not execute content, by limiting the types of content allowed there, disabling CGI execution, making sure .htaccess files are ignored, etc. Generally the content of these directories will be static images and so won't need to be executed.
You may find you are able to run the content-management part of the system using a different Apache instance than the user-viewable part. That would let you make these directories writable by the admin Apache instance but not the public one, then protect that Apache instance with firewall rules, a strong password, SSL, etc. This would most likely require a bit of work.
Finally, you can carefully review the security of these applications, their history of security incidents, etc. to determine if they are reliable enough to be trusted with this sort of access. If not, try to find one that is.
Sorry there are no simple answers there, but hopefully it is helpful.
------Scott.
