Rob Tanner wrote: > We're a four year college. Some maintainers are faculty, some are > staff and some are work-study (students) and centrally we have little > say over who can and can't. You can put super crucial username/passwords into httpd.conf or root-readable files that get included into httpd.conf Other than that, the basic rule to remember is: If PHP can read the password, so can anybody with a login. If that's not acceptable for that password, you have very few options: Move it to httpd.conf Get rid of that user Maybe you need to re-structure your server and its access levels to reflect reality. You probably trust faculty/staff more than students in terms of intentional abuse. Though naivete and ignorance might go the other way 'round. :-) You *could* run two pools of Apache servers, with two different configs, and two different PHP users, and give different User/Group settings in the two different httpd.conf files to separate your faculty/staff from your students. Though it might be cheaper to just buy a stock Linux box and move all the students to that box -- where you simply accept the fact that students are going to mess it up more than the faculty/staff box. At any rate, the problem is simply not solvable by PHP, and, when you get right down to it, not even in the PHP realm. Whatever trust level you have or don't have, the database passwords being readable by untrusted users who have logins is lower on the problem stack than a zillion other nasty things they can do if they have a login and you don't trust them. Fixing the passwords may well have looked like the easiest one to tackle, but it's not that easy at all, and you won't improve your general security health level even if it *was* something easy to fix, as the perpetrators would simply turn aside from db access and do more... interesting... things with their logins. PS Finding a perpetrator and penalizing them harshly and publicly may wake up some students to the risks of what they are doing. Or not... Worth considering. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
