Parsing paths properly is certainly a good idea. But perhaps a more important issue is why you're not running your web application in a secure sandbox in the fi

Parsing paths properly is certainly a good idea. But perhaps a more important issue is why you're not running your web application in a secure sandbox in the first place. I think SELinux is now standard part of the Linux kernel[1], and if you're using Ubuntu there's AppArmor[2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinux [2] https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/apparmor.html https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/apparmor.html