Oracle ThinkQuest Library Security Issue Clean-up

Abstract: As the Internet evolves and security attacks become more sophisticated, security has become one of the most challenging issues for website development and maintenance. Oracle Education Foundation (OEF funded by Oracle Corporation) maintains 7000 websites in ThinkQuest Library. These websites are developed by elementary school students, with PHP, Perl, and MySQL technologies. Because they have insufficient knowledge in website security, their websites may contain security issues and are hard for OEF to maintain. The purpose of this thesis is to seek an efficient and accurate solution to clean up the website security issues in ThinkQuest Library. The thesis consists 3 parts: improvement of Apache web server security configuration; summarizing methodology of manual fixing vulnerabilities and developing a simple script tool for security issue detection and cleaning up. These achievements can prevent illegal operations and attacks on the websites in ThinkQuest web server.