open_basedir? View as Markdown

The open_basedir ini setting has two significant problems:

1. It is a major performance hit, because it disables the realpath cache.

2. Many people think it is a security feature and use it as such. However,
   open_basedir is in reality a "best effort" mechanism, with known
   workarounds and more regularly being found. Especially when it comes to
   interactions with 3rd party libraries, enforcing open_basedir is simply
   impossible.

What open_basedir tries to do must be implemented on the operating system
level to work reliably (and of course such mechanisms exist, such as jails,
chroot and friends).

I wonder if it is feasible to drop this ini setting? Enforcing this doesn't
really seem like any of PHP's business. If not, I think we need to at least

a) make it clear in the documentation that this is not a security option
and only exists to prevent "accidents" and
b) update the security policy (https://wiki.php.net/security) to state that
open_basedir bypasses are not security issues. I believe this has been part
of Debian's security policy for some time already.

Apparently, there has been no resolution for this issue so far. While I
don't really care about the open_basdedir directive per se, I fully
agree that we should not advertize it as security feature, and to
clearly state this in the PHP manual, as well as in our security policy.

Christoph