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>
