pileofrogs, Some slightly off-forum suggestions, which I hinted at in responding to your original question. I hope I don't sound harsh or condescending - I am neither a security expert nor cgi expert!

• Seek not yet a Perl solution; but first the advice of other system administators on whether your proposal is wise.
• Look to do these tasks more efficiently yourself.
• If feasible, move these root procedures to a non-root account before making them accessible to others. (For example, do they pertain to an application that is root-owned simply for a privileged port, that could run as non-root on a higher port and be NAT'd?)
• Enable others to execute only discrete root tasks that do one thing, like restart a specific application or tail a specific log.
• Rather than cgi, have you ruled out shell-access? That would seem a minor inconvenience for the ability to pose as root; and would give you password enforcement, permissions, logging, etc.