Shifts the sandbox's symlink handling from "refuse the whole tarball"
to "drop the dangerous entries from extraction and record them as
quarantine actions". This is what sandbox mode is supposed to do —
make malicious cpmoves safe to import rather than gate-keeping them.
Three coordinated changes:
1. scan-symlinks.php — exit 0 even when DANGEROUS findings exist. The
JSON report is the source of truth; the caller decides what to do
with it. Usage/IO errors still exit 2. STDERR still names each
finding (now "STRIP X -> Y" instead of "refusing tarball") so the
streamed [container] log on the panel side surfaces them.
2. extract.sh — reads the scan-symlinks report, builds a
newline-delimited exclude list of DANGEROUS archive_paths, and
passes it to `tar --exclude-from=`. The stripped entries never
reach the filesystem; tar skips them silently. Also writes a small
JSON sidecar at $EXTRACT_DIR/.cpanel-importer-stripped-symlinks.json
describing each strip-action so the merge step can surface them in
report.json without re-parsing scan-symlinks output.
3. entrypoint.sh write_report — reads the sidecar, prepends each
stripped_dangerous_symlink action to the actions[] list, bumps
files_quarantined by the strip-count, and rewrites
summary_for_panel.alert_message to call them out distinctly:
"N dangerous symlink(s) stripped during extract; M files
quarantined; K cleaned in place. Customer site may have been
compromised at the source — recommend review."
Result on darkside: instead of the import failing on the ALFA
alfasymlink/root entry, that entry is silently skipped during
extract, recorded as `stripped_dangerous_symlink path=... target=/
reason=absolute target is root /`, and the rest of the tarball
extracts normally. Subsequent ClamAV scan + DB sanitization run
to completion; panel sees a verdict-completed import with the
stripped symlinks visible in the Sanitization Sandbox panel on the
results page.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Previous version of scan-symlinks.php was a verbatim port of the panel's
scanTarballForDangerousSymlinks(), which flagged every symlink whose
target sits under /etc, /usr, /bin, /sbin, /lib, /lib64, /var/lib,
/var/log, /var/cache, or /var/spool. That's the right posture for the
panel's pre-extract scan in DIRECT mode — refuse before extract — but
it makes the container REFUSE every cpmove that comes from a real
cPanel source server, including totally clean ones. Standard cPanel
accounts ship with stock symlinks like:
homedir/access-logs -> /usr/local/apache/domlogs/<user>
homedir/var/cpanel/styled/current_style
-> /usr/local/cpanel/base/frontend/...
homedir/.cpanel/email -> /usr/local/cpanel/...
homedir/etc -> /var/cpanel/userhomes/<user>/etc
Every customer tarball has 5-20 of these. Treating them as DANGEROUS
made the container abort with verdict=refused before extract.sh ever
ran. Surfaced on darkside import to whp02: scan-symlinks found
homedir/access-logs (a textbook cPanel symlink) and the import bombed.
The real destruction class — what ALFA TEaM Shell uses, what we saw
brick whp02 in May — is symlinks whose target is the exact filesystem
root or under one of the genuinely catastrophic system trees that
either escape the customer account or clobber boot/config/proc state:
/ exact root (the classic alfasymlink/root)
/etc config tampering, /etc/shadow exfil
/root root home dir
/boot bootloader / kernel
/proc process info / kernel knobs
/sys sysfs
/dev device nodes
Everything else (notably /usr, /var) becomes UNCERTAIN: reported in
the JSON output but doesn't refuse the tarball. With --cap-drop=ALL
--read-only --network none --user 999, a /usr-targeting symlink in
the container's sandbox can at worst dangle on extract; it can't
touch the host.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Skeleton for the cpanel-importer Docker container — a one-shot
sandbox the WHP panel invokes BEFORE extracting a customer cpmove
tarball. See cpanel-import-container-spec.md (in /workspace/) for the
full design.
What this ships in v1.0:
- Dockerfile: almalinux:10-minimal + PHP 8.4 (Remi) + ClamAV 1.4 +
SaneSecurity Foxhole.PHP rules + tar/mariadb-client/rsync. Runs as
UID 999 (whp-import) via the panel-side --user 999:999 flag.
- scripts/entrypoint.sh: validates env, runs (optional) freshclam,
drives extract -> scan-files -> scan-dbs -> rsync -> report.json.
- scripts/extract.sh + scripts/lib/scan-symlinks.php: pre-extract
symlink scan ported standalone from
web-files/libs/CpanelBackupImporter.php (the existing 2026-05-29
whp02 destruction-vector fix). Aborts with exit 3 before tar runs
if any DANGEROUS symlink is found.
- scripts/scan-files.php: ClamAV walk + classify-and-action. v1.0
ships with an empty cleaner registry — every hit is
QUARANTINE_ONLY. Cleaner hooks are stubbed for v1.1.
- scripts/scan-dbs.php: regex MyISAM -> InnoDB rewrite (always
applied), WordPress identification, and ONE WP content scan check
(siteurl_external_domain). v1.1 will grow the check set.
- scripts/lib/safety-net.php: container-narrow open_basedir
allow-list, much tighter than the panel-side one.
- .gitea/workflows/build-push.yaml: builds + smoke-tests +
PHP-syntax-checks + bash-syntax-checks before pushing to
repo.anhonesthost.net/cloud-hosting-platform/cpanel-importer.
- tests/build-fixtures.sh: builds cpmove-clean.tar.gz (benign WP
dump) and cpmove-alfa.tar.gz (the ALFA-shell symlink-to-/etc
vector) for local end-to-end testing.
- README.md / CONTRIBUTING.md: docker-run invocation, bind-mount
catalog, report.json schema, how to add a cleaner pattern or a WP
scan signature.
Local acceptance test results:
- clean fixture -> status=completed, 3 MyISAM->InnoDB, no flags, 0
- ALFA fixture -> exit 1, status=failed, failed_stage=extract,
"tarball contains dangerous symlinks; aborting" on stderr
- compromised-siteurl fixture -> imported_into_new_server=false,
.flagged file written, summary_for_panel.show_alert=true
Image size: 197 MB compressed (gzipped docker save), ~397 MB unique
layers extracted. Well under the spec's 600 MB compressed / 1.2 GB
extracted budget.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
