Web Access to Informix SE -- Security issues

A question to people generating Web pages from Informix data. How do you handle permissions? Here is what I am doing: This is Informix SE 5.XX under an NCR machine running their version of SVR5. I am experimenting with an CGI interface to an Informix database. At this point, I have a Perl 5 script that generates HTML forms, collects data from the user, builds a query, and submits the query to the database. The allowable queries (Read, Delete, Update) is determined by the CGI program based on the remote user ID. My first solution was have the http server run as an unprivileged user and SUID the CGI script owned by a full db user. The http server authenticates the remote users and passes the requests to the CGI interface, which handles the real db permissions. Well, this approach fails. Subprocesses generated by the SUID program inherit only the EFFECTIVE USER ID from the parent process, but Informix SE checks the REAL USER ID for the db permissions. The NCR OS won't allow non root logins to set the REAL USER ID (by design they say). The alternatives I have are no very promising: 1. Run the http server with a privileged user ID Open to a greater vulnerability to intrusion from Web users + A big dba problem, as more than one database would be accessed by the same http server. 2. Run the CGI scrip as root. Opens the whole system through potential bugs in the CGI script. In my case (no root access), also a bit of a nightmare to maintain. Every update depends on sysadmin intervention. Any other possibilities? I am surprised that the REAL_USER_ID is used to authenticate the user by the SE engine. Is this true for newer version of the SE? -- Geraldo Veiga (908)949-2469 Geraldo.Veiga@att.com Room 2C-429A 101 Crawfords Corner Road Holmdel, NJ 07733