Nginx, Varnish, Cherokee, thttpd, WEBrick, Yaws log escape sequence injection

Fortunately he put the only correct response to this nonsense right in there - saves me some typing. Quote from the varnish team:

This is not a security problem in Varnish or any other piece of software which writes a logfile.

The real problem is the mistaken belief that you can cat(1) a random logfile to your terminal safely.

This is not a new issue. I first remember the issue with xterm(1)'s inadvisably implemented escape-sequences in a root-context, brought up heatedly, in 1988, possibly late 1987, at Copenhagens University Computer Science dept. (Diku.dk). Since then, nothing much have changed.

The wisdom of terminal-response-escapes in general have been questioned at regular intervals, but still none of the major terminal emulation programs have seen fit to discard these sequences, probably in a misguided attempt at compatibility with no longer used 1970'es technology.

I admit that listing "found a security hole in all HTTP-related programs that write logfiles" will look more impressive on a resume, but I think it is misguided and a sign of trophy-hunting having overtaken common sense.

Instead of blaming any and all programs which writes logfiles, it would be much more productive, from a security point of view, to get the terminal emulation programs to stop doing stupid things, and thus fix this and other security problems once and for all.

Does anyone's VT100 emulator support the answerback function these days?

Terminal on OS X doesn't seem to. I think I remember in the dark ages there were some that let you set the answerback message remotely, but I suspect people figured out that was a bad idea.

Ah, but who among us didn't embed a CTRL-E in our "you are about to be idle killed" messages and set our answerback messages to "".

So... Their problem is that log files don't filter out VT100 escape sequences by default?

This is not a terribly serious bug...