There is some truth in the manager^3's fear: if you are running Perl through mod_perl on apache without any security in mind, the application runs with the privileges of the web server. If that is root, you have a problem.

As far as I remember though, Red Hat locked apache down by changing to some "nobody/nogroup" user after starting. If it is RH Enterprise 4 or later, SELinux might be used to further lock down the server. To such an extent that it might be a pain to get mod_perl running at all.

The bottom line is that mod_perl can be a security hole if the system has bad administration. With good administration (chroot, changing user/group after startup), mod_perl can be perfectly secure. It can never bypass OS security, but it can use the permissions it was granted.

In reply to Re: How to answer "Perl is not secure" objections? by lyklev
in thread How to answer "Perl is not secure" objections? by radiantmatrix

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