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Ten Security Checks for PHP, Part 1

by Clancy Malcolm

Web applications have become a popular way to provide global access to data, services, and products. While this global access is one of the Web's underlying advantages, any security holes in these applications are also globally exposed and frequently exploited. It is extremely easy to write applications that contain unintentional security holes. This is demonstrated by the range of common web applications, including PHPMyAdmin, PHPShop and FreeTrade, that have contained major security holes. The source code is often required to identify these holes, but it is common to make the source code of these applications available to the public. This article provides five steps to help identify or avoid such security holes in applications written using PHP.

Avoid Using Variables When Accessing Files

Consider the following code:

// $lib_dir is an optional configuration variable
include($lib_dir . "");

or worse still:

// $page is a variable from the URL

The user could set the $lib_dir or $page variables and include files such as /etc/passwd or remote files such as with malicious code. This malicious code could potentially delete files, corrupt databases, or change the values of variables used to track authentication status.

What to Look For

Search code for the following functions:

  • readfile
  • fopen
  • file
  • include
  • require

Possible Fixes or Improvements

  • Avoid using variables as file names. The $lib_dir variable above could be replaced with a value defined by the PHP define function.

  • Check the file name against a list of valid file names. For example,

    $valid_pages = array(
    	"apage.php"   => "",
    	"another.php" => "",
    	"more.php"    => "");
    if (!isset($valid_pages[$page])) {
    	// Abort the script
    	// You should probably write a log message here too
    	die("Invalid request");
  • If you must really use a variable from the browser, check the variable's value using code like the following:

    if (!(eregi("^[a-z_./]*$", $page) && !eregi("\\.\\.", $page))) {
    	// Abort the script
    	// You should probably write a log message here too
    	die("Invalid request");
  • See Do Not Trust Global Variables for further steps on ensuring variables cannot be maliciously set.

  • Use the allow_url_fopen and open_basedir configuration variables to limit the locations where files can be opened from.

Escape characters in SQL statements

A common mistake is to use a variable value supplied by the user or the URL in an SQL query without escaping special characters. Consider the following fragment of code from a script designed to authenticate a username and password entered in a HTML form:

          AND password='" . $password . "'";

// the record exists function is defined elsewhere
if (record_exists($query)) {
	echo "Access granted";
} else {
	echo "Access denied";

his code would work when accessed using check.php?username=admin&password=x. However, if the code were accessed using check.php?username=admin&password=a%27+OR+1%3Di%271 (and if magic_quotes_gpc were disabled) then the password condition becomes Password='a' or 1='1' so that the admin user record would always be returned regardless of the password it contained.

This problem is partly avoided when the magic_quotes_gpc variable is on in the php.ini file, meaning that PHP will escape quotes in GET, POST, and cookie data using the \ character. However, magic_quotes_gpc is frequently disabled because it could make other code behave strangely. Given a line containing echo $username in the above code fragment, any occurrences of ' would be replaced by \'). Furthermore the magic_quotes_gpc variable does not protect against variable values obtained from sources such as database records or files which a malicious user may have already modified during normal program operation.

Related Reading

Web Database Applications with PHP, and MySQL
By Hugh E. Williams, David Lane

What to Look For

Search for the query functions for your database. For example, if you are using MySQL, search for usage of the mysql_db_query function.

Possible Fixes or Improvements

  • Use the built-in addslashes function or a similar function to escape quotes and backslashes in SQL statements with backslashes.

  • Enabling magic_quotes_gpc may help, but don't rely upon it. (Enabling this setting and using addslashes will produce errors).

  • If you are using variables which you expect to contain numbers in your SQL statement, ensure that they really do contain numbers. You can use various built-in PHP functions including sprintf, ereg and is_long, to perform this check.

Do Not Trust Global Variables

If the register_globals option is enabled, PHP will create global variables for each GET, POST, and cookie variable included in the HTTP request. This means that a malicious user may be able to set variables unexpectedly. Consider the following code aimed to allow anonymous access to a single article and require authentication for all other articles:

// Assume $article_id is set by the URL
if ($article_id == 0) {
	$guest_ok = true;

if (!$guest_ok) {
	// Check user is authenticated using a function defined elsewhere

This code may appear to work, because the $guest_ok variable will generally be initialized to false. However, if a malicious user includes guest_ok=1 in the URL, he will be granted access to any article in the system.

A similar problem can arise when you perform security checks when showing links to pages but do not perform security checks on the linked pages themselves. In a system where users are granted access to a select list of articles, you should perform security checks when producing the list of available articles and when displaying an article selected from the list. Without this checking, a malicious user could type URLs for articles to which he should not have access and view the article successfully. Another common variation of this problem is to implement a "Remember My Login" feature by storing a user identifier in a cookie, allowing users to change their cookie value to login as whomever they want.

What to Look For

This problem can appear almost anywhere in your code. Pay careful attention to the following areas:

  • Authentication and permission checking code
  • Use of variables before they are initialized. (You can set the error_reporting configuration variable to give a warning whenever uninitialized variables are used.)
  • Use of variables designed to be set by GET or POST requests.

Possible Fixes or Improvements

  • Disable register_globals in your php.ini file. After making this change, you will need to use the $HTTP_GET_VARS and $HTTP_POST_VARS associative arrays to access GET and POST inputs instead of using global variables. This can be tedious, but also far more secure.

  • If a "Remember My Login" function is required, include a password or a hard to guess random identifier in the cookie. (A "Remember My Login" function can still produce other holes such as malicious user who shares a machine with a legitimate user to gain access.)

  • Write code to initialize all global variables. The previous code fragment could be improved by initializing $guest_ok to false at the start of the script.

  • Ensure session variables really do come from the session and not from a malicious user.

  • Write code to check that a global variable is not in the $HTTP_POST or $HTTP_GET associative arrays.

Avoid False Uploads

File uploads can suffer from a severe case of the untrusted global variables problem that is worth considering as an additional problem. When a file is uploaded, a PHP script is given a variable that provides the name of the temporary file where PHP saves the uploaded file. However, the user could construct a URL that sets this variable to a malicious value such as /etc/passwd and not upload a file. The responding script may then copy that file to an accessible location or display the file's contents to the user.

What to Look For

Examine all scripts that respond to file uploads. Searching for type="file" may help identify these scripts.

Possible Fixes or Improvements

  • Recent versions of PHP have the is_uploaded_file and move_uploaded_file functions that allows the programmer to ensure that they are working with uploaded files.

  • If you are not sure that your code will be running on a recent version of PHP, set the upload_tmp_dir configuration setting and then perform input checking to ensure that the file you are working with is in this directory.

Escape HTML Characters in Text

What happens if somebody puts a <blink> tag in a posting to a discussion board? If you don't escape HTML characters in text either before you save or display it, all subsequent text on the page could be blinking. More severe versions of this attack are also possible; for example an attacker could write JavaScript that takes the browser to a competitor's site.

Related Reading

Web Security, Privacy & Commerce
By Simson Garfinkel

What to Look For

Identify pages which display text entered by untrusted users.

Possible Fixes or Improvements

  • Escape HTML appropriately either before you save it or before you display it. You can use PHP's built-in functions htmlspecialchars or htmlentities for this purpose.

  • If you want untrusted users to use HTML for formatting, you should perform validation to restrict the available HTML tags to a basic tags set, like <b> and <i>.

Further Ideas

Part two of this article will feature five more security checks for PHP. In the meantime, here are three ideas to keep in mind as you design your application.

  • Encrypt or use hashes of passwords when storing them (PHP's md5 function is useful for this)

  • Don't store credit card numbers: it is generally better to use a third-party payment gateway instead

  • Enforce strong passwords. Password strength requirements vary from application to application, but consider, at a minimum, enforcing passwords that are at least six characters long and contain some non-alphanumeric characters.

Clancy Malcolm is a private web application consultant and contributes to numerous open source projects.

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