ModSecurity: directory hiding a.k.a. security by obscurity
Ok, that’s a bit misleading, because i’m not just hiding, but also blocking and logging. What i wanted is this: I’m running awstats on my reverse proxy, but i don’t want anyone to know. So i just made the entire ‘cgi-bin’ part forbidden for everyone, so that covers the script. The fact that my webserver has a cgi-bin directory is nothing special and won’t tell you i’m using awstats. However, awstats also uses icons, and these are by default in /awstats-icon/
Now, i could have made that restricted as well, but that still would give you the information that it exists! ModSecurity to the rescue. I want only access to awstats from my workstation, so i added these rules:
SecFilterSelective REMOTE_ADDR “!192.168.1.2” chain SecFilterSelective REQUEST_URI “/awstats-icon/” log,deny,status:404
These say: if the ipaddress of the visitor is not 192.168.1.2, and his request contains /awstats-icon/, we log it, block it, and send back a 404 error. This makes the visitor think the directory doesn’t exist on the server.
I’m not sure how easy this can be extended to giving an entire subnet access though, maybe i’ll investigate this later.