Modern PHP Security Excellent Benefits

In this article, we will discuss “Modern PHP Security Excellent Benefits”. PHP significantly reduces many things like security issues, time issues, and garbage issues throughout the development of projects. It links well to the database management system like SQL, Oracle, and Sybase to provide efficient data storage and interaction services. Hence, most of the clients chose PHP technology-based development for their customized web applications.

PHP in comparison to other technologies

With a commitment of high security and stability, PHP is simple, clean, fluent, and organized, so that it will become boon for the new users.

Valuable Advantages of PHP Security

Mr. Rasmus Lerdorf had designed PHP in 1994 for the purpose of server-side programming language and front-end scripting. Now, it functions as the main weapon for the comprehensive website development. Initially, PHP stands for “Personal Home Page”, but everybody says it as “Personal Hypertext Preprocessor”. Some of the best examples of PHP made site are Facebook and Harvard University.

CMS

Now, the developers made the most popular CMS solutions like WordPress, Magento, and Drupal, etc. Also, the CMS based website would be accompanied with high-level security setup.

Cross Platform

In the development of some significant Operating Systems like Windows, UNIX, Solaris, and Linux, PHP plays a major role in developing the component. PHP effortlessly interfaces with Java, Apache, and MySQL both. Hence, the developers save time and the product owner saves money in re-designing and extending the web application.

More About PHP Security

Implementing security systems with PHP coding is more valuable for a website. This security improves the trust of the end user. It also reduces the complexity of the end user, who doesn’t have knowledge about security implementation.

TLS /SSL Misconfiguration

TLS/ SSL are security standards which grant highly secure communication between two different parties by providing two key features.

Firstly, it encrypts communications between both parties to restrict the exchange of data.

Secondly, single or both parties can get their identity verified through SSL Certificates to avoid potential MITM attackers. MITM stands for Man-In-The-Middle who performs a Peerjacking Attack at the time of communication. Of course, every encryption needs SSL certificates to avoid MITM attack. Otherwise, MITM decrypts all messages between client and server.

The secure TLS/ SSL connections verify identity between both parties so that there is no gap between both parties. SSL Context ensures HTTPS connections in a highly secure method. Also, it puts control over DOCTYPE of an XML file and curls wrapper (cURL) completely.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, FALSE);

Security against Attacks by XML Injection

XML Injection includes various attacks like XXE(XML External Entity Injection) and XEE(XML Entity Expansion).

XML External Entity Injection

An XXE attack starts instilling an External Entity into XML that a parser attempts to expand by location to a system call. This attack can introduce either by reading through a file and effort an HTTP GET appeal to a URL, or to invoke a PHP wrapper filter or PHP stream URI. This vulnerability attack discloses secret information like File Content, Access Control components or Denial Of Service. However, PHP security restricts these attacks successfully.

XML Entity Expansion

An XEE attack includes XML parser’s ability to spread entities to exhaust memory completely. For example Denial of Service. They mainly attack SimpleXML, DOM, and XMLReader due to dependency on libxml2.  Therefore, SSL peer verification helps prevent MITM to reduce XEE attack.

PHP security for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS Restricted Escaping Features)

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is the most genuine security attack on PHP applications and all libraries. It causes mainly two problems like Input Validation and Output Escaping or Sanitisation.

Input Validation Attacks

Initially the filter_var() code validated URLs. In contrast to this ignored a subtle feature missing which get attached to a validation failure issue.

PHP developers need to follow some solutions are filter_var($_GET['http_url'], FILTER_VALIDATE_URL);or $_GET['http_url'] = "javascript://foobar%0Aalert(1)"

Output Escaping or Sanitisation Attacks

This attack is a postulation based issue where programmers consider PHP offers through HTML URl contexts.

URL Context

PHP makes the rawurlencode() code for safe injection of data into a URL reference like the href attribute as output. Also, it validates entire URLs after any input of untrusted data to detect any creative manipulations. Apparently, keep in mind the problem with validating URLs through the filter extension.

HTML Context

The “htmlspecialchars()” code is the only escaping function in PHP and HTML Body. Hence, you need to aware of it to handle the security issue.

PHP security Stream URL Injection Attack (Local/Remote File attack)

Some functions like include_once(), include(), require_once() and require() accept remote URLs when allow_url_include is used. There is a chance of attack through allow_url_include functions and for this reason, PHP developers need to work on that.

Conclusion

In this article, we are discussing “PHP Security”. Hoping the developers must get some basic idea to tackle PHP security issues at the time of working with PHP projects. We will discuss more on securities such as SQL Injections, Malware attack, Hacking and lots more in our future articles. Please feel free to add comments if any query or you can share your feedback 🙂

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