Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

F.7. Security

Another topic of interest in web environments is security. When running under mod_perl, all Perl code shares the same interpreter. This means that every application can access data from every other application. Embperl maintains a separate namespace for every document, which prevents accidentally overwriting other applications' data but provides no real security. You can still access anything you like if you explicitly specify a package name.

Therefore, Embperl incorporates Safe.pm, which makes it impossible to access any packages other than your own. This can be used, for example, to calculate something in a Perl module and then pass the results to an Embperl document. If the Embperl document runs in a safe namespace, it can access the data it has received from the browser, but it can't access data outside itself. Therefore, you can safely let different people create the layouts for Embperl pages.

Safe.pm also permits the administrator to disable any set of Perl opcodes. This gives you the power to decide which Perl opcodes are permitted for use by the page creators.