PHP Security Consortium Launched

Chris Shiflett writes "We're happy to announce the official launch of the PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC). Our mission is 'to promote secure programming practices within the PHP community through education and exposition while maintaining high ethical standards.' You can read the official press release or visit us at phpsec.org."

Comments

Want to make PHP more secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop all insecure legacy features like "register globals".

Use exception handling from top to bottom. Don't allow an error or return value to go unchecked.

Run code in some kind of sandbox by default. Example: fork and chroot each PHP script. Safe mode isn't good enough.

HTML ESCAPE BY DEFAULT. Use a separate set of tags for un-escaped output. Isn't it ridiculous that you have to remember to HTML escape output??? All you have to do is forget one spot, and congratulations, your app is on bugtraq.

Then I'll start to take PHP seriously.

As long as PHP caters to the bottom 95% ("but if we change that, people will get confused"). I'll look elsewhere.

Re:Good

[blankslate]

So what do you want? People who don't know how to write secure code are writing *insecure* code with PHP. Should they
a) write crap code themselves, or
b) use tested and audited code, save themselves some time and get to see how it should be done in the process.

And while there is no 'magic widget' that will fix your whole app, it's definitely possible to create a widget which will handle the login properly (probably where most SQL injection attacks occur), perhaps force a sensible password policy and maybe some code to test for some common security flaws (whether in code or against a live server).

And - WHY can't you create a general purpose secure file streamer? I'm curious ... seems to me if you have configuration options for the private folder and a callout to a user defined function to check credentials (ok, so they might need to sorta understand this), it wouldn't be too hard ..