PHP Security Expert Resigns

juct writes "PHP security holes have a name — quite often it was Stefan Esser who found and reported them. Now Esser has quit the PHP security team. He feels that his attempt to make PHP safer "from the inside" is futile. Basic security issues are not addressed sufficiently by the developers. Zeev Suraski, Zend's CTO of course disagrees and urges Stefan to work with the PHP development team instead of working against it. But given the number of remote code execution holes in PHP apps this year, Esser might have a point. And he plans to continue his quest for security holes in PHP. Only that from now on, he will publish them after reasonable time — regardless if a patch is available or not." Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Zeev Suraski wrote in to protest: "I'm quoted as if I 'point fingers at inexperienced developers,' and of course, there's no link to that — because it's not true! The two issues — security problems in Web apps written in PHP, and security problems in PHP itself — are two distinct issues. Nobody, including myself, is saying that there are no security problems in PHP — not unlike pretty much any other piece of software. Nobody, I think, argues the fact that there have been many more security problems at the application level, then there were at the language level. I never replied to Stefan's accusations of security problems in PHP saying 'that's bull, it's all the developers' fault,' and I have no intention to do it in the future."

Comments

Actual announcement

[kjart]

Here's the announcement from the source himself, via his blog. Based on that post I'd say he sounds pretty disgruntled with how his efforts towards security were received i.e. "he PHP Group will jump into your boat as soon you try to blame PHP's security problems on the user but the moment you criticize the security of PHP itself you become persona non grata"

As a PHP user....

[MasterC]

As a PHP user, I have attempted to better the thing by reporting what I think are bugs. I can't name a single one that wasn't closed with a WONTFIX and a terse, non-thankful "that is a feature, not a bug." I honestly have zero disbelief that those same programmers would turn against Esser when he blamed the language, not the user, for the security problem.

In particular, the late static binding issue (if B extends A then A::staticFunc() ran as B::staticFunc() is ran under class A not B). It's like how it took MySQL took a decade to get stored procedures and views despite many people asking for it. Many people complain about the late static binding issue but last I knew it was still "it's a feature, not a bug."

Regardless, thanks for your work Mr. Esser...

PHP ought to be forked

[Jesus_666]

Someone should fork PHP and do a major rewrite. Drop features like HTML embedding, introduce properly defined packages and make all functionality available in both procedural and OO fashions. Clean up the function names so they're predictable. And make some of the more dangerous functions safer.
PHP could be turned into a decent general purpose scripting language if someone would fork it. Unfortunately that means that we'd need someone who knows the codebase, has time and is fed up with the current PHP development process. Maybe we could talk Esser into it...