WEB SECURITY ADVISOR
What your Apache Web server is telling the bad guys
JOHN BUNKER
03.15.2002
Rating: -4.24- (out of 5)
This tip was submitted to the SearchSecurity Tip Exchange Contest by user John Bunker. Let other users know how useful it is and help John win a prize by rating the tip below.
Does your web server give out too much
information? Here is how to discover what
your Web server is telling the world
and how to restrict that information
if you have an Apache server.
On most Linux boxes you can use
wget to probe a Web server.
wget -S 'www.sitename.com'
will show
Server: Apache/1.3.17 (Unix) PHP/4.0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.25
is running on
sitename Web site.
Or you can download ID Serve from
Gibson Research at:
http://grc.com/id/idserve.htm to run on
your Windows 2000 machine. This is a gui
program which will show you information
similar to wget.
In Apache, you can restrict information
given out by setting ServerTokens. See
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/core.html#servertokens
for the switches to use. For example,
adding the line:
ServerTokens Min
to your httpd.conf file will allow only
minimal information to be sent out:
Server sends (e.g.): Server: Apache/1.3.0
The default is:
ServerTokens Full (or not specified)
which yields too much information. The server sends, for example
Server: Apache/1.3.0 (Unix) PHP/3.0 MyMod/1.2
If your Apache is newer than 1.3.12, set ServerTokens Prod
Server sends (for example)
Server: Apache
Thereby only telling the world you are running
Apache. We don't need to advertise that
we are running php, mod_perl, etc., as
well as the version running. We need to
make the bad guys work harder than that.
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