[asterisk-users] Function SHELL not registered

[A J Stiles]

On Wednesday 06 Jul 2016, Michael Jepson wrote:
> Adding live_dangerously did the trick. Thanks! But how dangerous is
> Asterisk living now ?

I must admit, still using an ancient Asterisk version, I didn't know about 
live_dangerously.  But it sort of makes sense.
 

It is somewhat dangerous to have a function that can execute arbitrary system 
commands, especially as root.  Just how dangerous depends on what commands can 
end up being executed.  For instance, it probably would -not- be a good idea 
to include something like

exten => 666,1,NoOp(${SHELL(/sbin/init 0)})

in a dialplan on a production server .....


Just be careful what commands you execute and what parameters you feed to 
them.  You might even want to use a wrapper script around anything that could 
misbehave if given a wrong parameter  (especially if the paramters depend on 
anything user-settable);  do a quick sanity-check in the script itself, and 
only execute the "real" command if everything is within the range you expect.


And don't think that blocking SHELL() makes your Asterisk server magically 
safe.  You can still run dangerous system commands from within an AGI script.


-- 
AJS

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