Posted by trey.bruce on 12/30/05 07:21

Balazs Wellisch wrote:
> >> > 2) Once 1 is done, how, when they log back on (authenticated with SQL
> >> > which will keep up with their username), do I allow them access to
> >> > their files for download? I would like to use Linux file permissions
> >> > to try and have some sort of security (i.e., would like to store users'
> >> > files under /home/[user]/files), but how do I allow the PHP script to
> >> > securely access their files, when the script runs under the Apache uid?
> >> > Is this a job for suExec?
> >> >
> >>
>
> I think it would be much simpler and just as secure to store the files
> outside the web root and use a script to retrive them based on information
> in a database table. So you're HTML in case of an image would look something
> like this:
>
> <img src="fileserver.php?userId=XXX&fileID=XXX">
>
> Then the script "fileserver.php" would look up the appropriate details for
> the file including its mime type and return it to the browser. It would also
> be responsible for authenticating the request based on the userId. For added
> security the userId can either be encrypted or stored in the session so it
> doesn't have to be passed in on the URL.

Interesting. That's a good idea. Would this directory off the
web-root be owned by the apache user/group? (Doesn't the PHP script
run as the apache user?) Cause if the files were just world-readable,
I would have to figure a way to get the files there after uploading in
the first place, which presumably could just be a perl script or
something run as the owner of the directory.

Thanks for the idea,
jab3

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