Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm reading this right, this is something that sounds a little bit like Apache MultiViews but isn't. 1. It doesn't sound like they were using MultiViews at all but some rewrite rule that rerouted all requests ending in .srv to a shell script in /bin. This isn't how MultiViews works. The file must exist, and it must be in the document root. A request to /foo won't work unless /foo.php (or foo.html, etc.) exists. 2.…
> It doesn't sound like they were using MultiViews at all but some rewrite rule that rerouted all requests ending in .srv to a shell script in /bin The request to a.srv (in their example) was only authorized because a request to /index.html/a.srv looked like a request to /index.html to the auth module because the auth module did not check PATH_INFO. The request was then passed to the ssid daemon (not shell script) ov…
They could have done further configuration to let HTML files take PATH_INFO, but this Rube Goldberg machine of multiple mistakes bears no more connection to MultiViews than mod_rewrite. In fact, I see no mention in the article of MultiViews or its module, mod_negotiation. So how do we know they were using MultiViews and not mod_rewrite, which people use much more often for this amount of indirection?
Either way, this exploit is impossible in the original suggestion, to just use MultiViews with PHP files to remove the ".php"