We recommend you don't take security issues too lightly. Chamilo is security-audited at least once a year, but you're never too sure. This list is a work in progress. Feel free to recommend additional measures by sending us an e-mail at info@chamilo.org.
It is considered a safer behaviour not to disclose server information from your Chamilo page. In order to avoid both web server and PHP information disclosure, you might want to take the following actions:
Make sure you check our security issues page from time to time. You can also follow our security Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/chamilosecurity.
Additionally to lacking the implementation of features that really improve the quality of your browsing the Internet, older browsers tend to have many unresolved security flaws. Using an old browser, you put in danger the security of your computer and the data it contains, but you can also put others in danger by letting crackers take control of it and attacking others.
To avoid being a risk to yourself and others, you should download and install a recent browser. We recommend the latest stable version of Firefox.
It is considered unsafe to leave the configuration file inside the app/config/ directory, as it will be directly accessible for all users, which could lead crackers to download it, uninterpreted, and read through your configuration, which could lead to illicit access to your database if that one isn't well protected and many other stuff we'd prefer to avoid. To secure it, move the configuration file out of your web directory. If your Chamilo installation is in /var/www/, move your configuration to /etc/chamilo/configuration.php, for example. Then create a new app/config/configuration.php file, open it, and write the following:
<?php require '/etc/chamilo/configuration.php';
This will prevent direct access to your settings and make it seem totally the same to Chamilo.
Making all the Chamilo files world-writable will help you install quickly, and it solves many issues for people without much admin experience. However, it's more secure to make a distinct user owner of all the chamilo files and folders, and only give read access to the web server to all files, and write access only to the directories previously mentioned.
This way, these files need only be readable and writable by the Apache process owner, not by the entire world. It would also be advisable to make all writable directory refuse the interpretation of PHP files (except for the root of the courses directories).
Don't hesitate to hire an experienced administrator to do that, it might be a bit more expensive now, but you'll be happy not to have to loose all of your data to a hacker who attacked your site.
Only the following directories have required (or optional) write
permissions from the web server:
<Directory /var/www/URL/app/cache>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/app/courses>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/app/home>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/app/logs>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/app/upload>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/app/Resources/public/css>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/main/default_course_document/images>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/main/lang>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/URL/web/css>
php_admin_value engine Off
</Directory>
For Nginx, this would look like the following rules. However, do
remember that Nginx interprets rules in order of appearance, so these
rules would have to be at the top of your location rules to take the
highest priority:
location ~ ^/app/(cache|courses|home|logs|upload|Resources/public/css)/.*\.ph(p[3457]?|t|tml|ar)$ {
deny all;
}
location ~ ^/main/default_course_document/images/.*\.ph(p[3457]?|t|tml|ar)$ {
deny all;
}
location ~ ^/main/lang/.*\.ph(p[3457]?|t|tml|ar)$ {
deny all;
}
location ~ ^/web/css/.*\.ph(p[3457]?|t|tml|ar)$ {
deny all;
}
A relatively recent development in web security, HTTP headers can be modified either from the web server or from the application (like Chamilo) to increase the security of your visitors.
These implies several aspects, from simple to complex, to deal with, from stuff like indicating which websites you say media or libraries can be loaded from, to adding extra info about your SSL certificate to make sure a hacked certification authority will not immediately make your certificate useless.
In Chamilo 1.11.6, we have added several parameters, together with recommendations, to main/install/configuration.dist.php, that you are free to use or ignore, depending on the level of security you want to achieve.
>To check your portal for possible improvements in terms of headers security,
we highly recommend the securityheaders.io
website. If you want to read more about CSP and all related headers
security techniques, check Scott Helme's blog.
If .htaccess is enabled or the .htaccess rules are translated into the
web server vhost configuration (see installation guide for that), Chamilo
will do some natural files access protection.
This protection is executed through redirections of some URLs to make the
request go through some kind of permissions validation script. For
documents, this means going through the main/document/download.php script,
but there are some more specific rules (see .htaccess for details).
While this does a great job to avoid access by unprivileged users, this
also creates an efficiency issue, whereby some files, in version 1.11, can
take up to 5 times the load time when it goes through the permissions
validation.
Because of that, we have taken some decisions to reduce the impact in a
reasonable way. For example, static files in SCORM content
(in courses/[code]/scorm/) like CSS, JS, PNG, JPG and GIF are *not* scanned
this way (there is an exception for that). We believe that these resources
do not contain confidential information. If you *DO* have confidential
information in images, CSS or JavaScript files, you will need to update
these rules to suit your needs.
In order to disable webservices add the configuration below:
$_configuration['disable_webservices'] = true;
To force users to change their password on their first login, add the configuration below:
$_configuration['force_renew_password_at_first_login'] = true;
and add the 'ask_new_password' checkbox extra field to users.
To hide the breadcrumb on pages with the "not allowed" error message, add the configuration below:
$_configuration['hide_breadcrumb_if_not_allowed'] = true;
SVG files and HTML files containing inline SVG are vulnerable to XSS attacks. This is a general fact, not
immediately related to Chamilo, but that can affect it.
As a general rule of thumb, you should not let your portal open to unauthenticated people, and you should not
allow unknown or unreliable people to upload content to your portal.
But in case you do, or accesses of reliable people get stolen and abused, you might want to take precautions to
avoid as much as possible giving the tools to crackers to damage your portal's reputation.
The following are a series of measures you can take to reduce the risk to the maximum when talking about the
combination of SVG and XSS.