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Close .tpl access with .htaccess


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The index.php in the template directory only protects you if someone enters the root of a particular directory. However if they know the exact file name they are looking for, it is very possible that the contents of the file will be output into the browser. Particularly for Smarty .tpl files.

 

I only thought about this because I saw that someone had found my website using the phrase "Powered by WHMCS" coupled with the fact that it seems that many are using the Smarty {php} tag (not recommended by Smarty authors btw) which could include sensitive information.

 

Anyway the fix is simple, here is the quick way if you are using an apache server with .htaccess enabled.

 

Put this into your .htaccess file in the web root of your site.

<Files ~ "\.tpl$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

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You can also control this to a point in your robots.txt if the search engine bot uses robot rules.

 

robots.txt

-------------------------------

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*.tpl$

-------------------------------

 

without the --------- lines

 

The index.php in the template directory only protects you if someone enters the root of a particular directory. However if they know the exact file name they are looking for, it is very possible that the contents of the file will be output into the browser. Particularly for Smarty .tpl files.

 

I only thought about this because I saw that someone had found my website using the phrase "Powered by WHMCS" coupled with the fact that it seems that many are using the Smarty {php} tag (not recommended by Smarty authors btw) which could include sensitive information.

 

Anyway the fix is simple, here is the quick way if you are using an apache server with .htaccess enabled.

 

Put this into your .htaccess file in the web root of your site.

<Files ~ "\.tpl$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

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It's not a matter of helping more or not. Simply perform the test that I illustrated a couple messages above and see if you can browse your way to one of your site's templates. If you can see the template code as text then you need to close this hole. If you cannot see the template code then you are as helped as possible.

 

http://yourdomain.com/whmcs/templates/default/banned.tpl

 

 

PS. The only IIS users that would be affected is 5 and below. In IIS 6 and higher they blocked access to most filetypes by default and you would only need to worry about this if something you changed on the IIS server allowed you to browse to the URL example I provided above.

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You can also control this to a point in your robots.txt if the search engine bot uses robot rules.

 

The rule in .htaccess will block access from browsers or bots. Not all search bots follow the rules you place in robots.txt either ;)

 

Personally I'm somewhat hesitant to place rules in robot.txt for files that I am trying to obscure. Anyone can read this robots.txt file and gain insight into what you are trying to protect, although security via obscurity really is a bad policy to begin with.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Have you entered it ino the .htaccess file in the root directory, or one in the folder where the tpl files are?

 

You can have a .htaccess file in every directory, and it is a good way to have different rules throughout your site... (without having a mega complext top level one anyway).

 

Try placing a .htaccess file into your template directory with the following in it...

 

<Files "*.tpl">
Order Allow,Deny
Deny from All
</Files>

 

This should prevent the issue with https:// still allowing access to them

 

Additionally, you should ensure that you still have a blank index file in every directory, unless of course there is one that actually is needed to display stuff.

 

This will prevent people seeing the actual list of files within the directory. I know it's a basic website requirement, but some people can miss it!!

Edited by ChrisGooding
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Additionally, you should ensure that you still have a blank index file in every directory, unless of course there is one that actually is needed to display stuff.

This will prevent people seeing the actual list of files within the directory. I know it's a basic website requirement, but some people can miss it!!

 

You can also shut of indexing by default on the entire server, something we do for all of ours. If someone wants to display an index, we allow overrides.

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This is also configurable from the .htaccess file using the options -indexes line

 

Here is the top of my .htaccess file located at the webroot of my site:

 

RewriteEngine On
Options -Indexes

<Files ~ "\.tpl$">
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</Files>

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Since we're building on this, if you have more than one file type to deny, use this:

<Files ~ "\.(tpl|bak|old)$">

Order allow,deny

Deny from all

</Files>

Many folks working in shell will rename a file "bak" or "old" to move it out of the way and preserve the pre-change version. If you don't deny tpl, for instance, and rename one as "xx.tpl.bak"...Apache will serve it as text, usually, just as if you hadn't blocked direct access. ;)

 

Oh, and earlier in this thread someone gave "*.tpl". Don't use that, as it won't work properly. "." has special meaning "one character"...you need to escape it with the slash to have it work. Chances are pretty good that "*.tpl" will cause a 500 error.

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Just wanted to mention that best practice in programming is to not have duplicate code when you can keep it in a central location.

 

Editing one .htaccess file beats out having to edit multiple .tpl files.

 

Bear's suggestion of having the rule affect multiple file types makes this even more powerful.

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