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Why do people always implement stuff like this in CGI (C or C++)?

Using nginx+php/perl/python would work just the same and prevent a whole slew of vulnerabilities in embedded devices, while at the same time reducing maintenance and development costs.

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I agree with the sentiment but running nginx+Python on an embedded MIPS device? That's getting pretty ridiculous! Better to go the other way (lower-level), I think.

I don't think using Python is significantly more ridiculous than the current practice of either using shell scripts or your own C code to parse form-data and generate HTML. In fact, it's probably a lot less ridiculous.

nginx has approx. 20MB footprint for 4 worker threads, add another 20MB for php... RAM is cheap these days, the cost of "ACME: Routers xxx,yyy,zzz hacked" headlines should be higher than the cost of equipping every router with 128MB of RAM.

Even if you do the actual scripts in CGI, alone using nginx for the HTTP part would kill off many of the security problems arising from buggy HTTP header/auth parsing.

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