PHP Application Insecurity - PHP or Devs Fault?

somersault asks: "There have recently been a lot of people making jokes at the expense of PHP, but how many common security flaws in PHP are the fault of the language, and how many the fault of the developer? A recent Security Focus article (via the Register) has a brief discussion which suggests that PHP is no less secure than any other scripting language, and that it is the users of the language themselves who need to be educated. The other side of the story is that the developers of PHP should work on tightening up the language to make it more 'idiot proof' by default. Should the team developing PHP take a more active role in controlling the use of their language? What will it take to ensure that users of the language learn to use it securely, short of defacing every vulnerable website out there?"

Comments

The problem is ....

[lambent]

The problem is that so many neophyte progrrammesr jump into PHP to create something visible and useful. Which they succeed in doing, more often that not, I guess. But without a proper background in security and proper practice, there's a ton of vulnerabilities that get created, accidentally, over and over again by every new PHP programmer.

The same can be said about any other language. Take for instance, C. Very easy to create working code that's vulnerable as hell. Is this the original author's fault? Of course not. I'm sorry that whoever chose to write a webapp in PHP is ignorant of basic security principals, but it's not up to the coders of PHP to protect us from ourselves.

Re:Tool safety

[VGPowerlord]

Have you ever used PHP? If not, take a look at the following features:

1. addslashes() function - Most references say to use this to quote data before putting it into a database. Not only is it The Wrong Way To Do It (twwtdi) according to the SQL standard, but different vendors' databases need different values escaped.
2. Magic Quotes ini settings. magic_quotes_gpc is the most important one. When enabled, it runs addslashes() on all GET, POST, and cookie input. It is on by default in php.ini-dist, off by default in php.ini-recommended. Which brings up my next point...
3. The programming environment is not consistent. An INI file controls the programming environment. Turning on things like Safe mode and open_basedir can cause previously working code to suddenly fail. Of course, php.ini-dist has display errors turned on by default, so anyone visiting that page will see the location of your file, the line that has the error, and which error it is... Which brings up the next point:
4. Security is secondary to convenience. See Using remote files, which is enabled in both ini files by default. See also Magic Quotes as described earlier. Reading up on the deprecated Register Globals is informative, as it was on by default up until PHP 4.2.0. I've also mentioned display_errors, which is on in php.ini-dist.
   
   Here's a disturbing fact: php.ini-dist is the more ocmmonly used of the two inis, at least for shared hosting. I'll let you consider the implications of that while I summarize things.

To summarize: The PHP team has made a number of questionable decisions over the years that makes it much easier to write a security hole than it should be.