How safe is it to allow www-data to run sudo quota?

Question

I manage the hosting of a custom Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) CMS and Ecommerce system. This system is powered by a cluster of LAMP servers behind an HAproxy instance, and each customer / domain has their own unix account on the cluster and in LDAP. Each customer purchases a given amount of data storage which we manage using a cPanel server, so the quotas are enforced by standard linux kernel / NFS quotas.

I want to be able to provide disk space usage statistics in my customers' web admin dashboard. On the LAMP cluster as root I can run /usr/bin/quota domain.name to get the disk space used by any given domain. However our Apache instances run as UID www-data.

Is it safe to allow www-data to run sudo /usr/bin/quota with NOPASSWD?

Answer 1

If your sudoers configuration ensures that /usr/bin/quota is the only thing that www-data is allowed to run with root privileges, then yes, this sounds reasonably safe.

However, it still is riskier than needed. A safer approach would be to set up a cron job to retrieve this information periodically (say, every 1-5 minutes) and output it to a file that www-data has access to read.

Answer 2

Miles answer is right.. the correct approach is tie in some task queue system into your application and workers check the task queue for jobs to run.. they could check every second and have better control over the user they run as.. So you can avoid the cron delay.