piwigio_privacy

A plugin to increase the privacy of Piwigo gallery

Piwigo privacy will validate users before allowing access to Piwigo images and other uploaded files.

It has two modes of operations

• Naive - all images are directed to get.php where access is analyzed derivative are created and files are served
• Advanced - Using a custom web server configuration (see piwigo-nginx-site for NGINX sample) get.php will validate files and create derivative but will pass the actual serving of files to the web server.

Notice that with both modes you need to make sure your static file folders are blocked from public web access You should also disable i.php script since it sends files back to the client without validating the permissions. You can look at piwigo-nginx-site which does all of that.

Install

Clone the repository to your in your Piwigo plugins folder (should create the path plugins/piwigo_privacy) in Piwigo config file (local/config/config.inc.php) set derivative_url_style config to 1 -

$conf['derivative_url_style']=1;

Go to Piwigo admin panel and under plugins management activate piwigo_privacy

If you want to use advance mode with NGINX also set the config -

$conf['piwigo_privacy_redirect_header'] = 'X-Accel-Redirect';

Using a different server that supports X-send-files might be possible by settings the headers accordingly but this plugin was only tested with NGINX. if you get it to work with other servers a pull request with a sample configuration would be appreciated.

Less strict configuration

On most Piwigo installs you'll never need to enable the following configs. This configs are only necessary if you imported your Piwigo gallery from a different system and your previous gallery contained paths with spaces or special chars.

Note that some web apps might be vulnerable to code and command injections by passing weird formatted file names I am not aware of any such vulnerabilities in this plugin or in Piwigo but allowing whitespaces or special chars might increase the likelihood of such attack. (so only enable the following config options if some of your images fail to load properly)

If your file names or paths contain spaces you might need to allow whitespace in file names

$conf['piwigo_privacy_allow_whitespaces'] = true;

If your file names or paths contain special chars you'll need to allow special chars in file names

$conf['piwigo_privacy_allow_special_chars'] = true;

Disclaimer

This plugin is a lot more complex than my initial implementation.

I can assume many performance improvements can be made since performance wasn't one of my main goals in implementing it.

Though I hope it improves the privacy of you Piwigo install you should be aware that Piwigo security implementations are very naive and proper Documentation is scares, I tried to do my best so this plugin won't introduce any new security issues and hopefully help to mitigate any existing ones but it still might be possible to bypass this plugin and get access to images (With my previous implementation for example I was completely unaware that Piwigo built in i.php does not validate user permissions when serving images).

For more information about the idea behind this plugin and the previous implementation check out my blog post about Securing Private Piwigo Albums