Can I hide the actual URL of a specific page? - php

I want to hide the url of a specific page to prevent users accessing it directly.
I have a form which users have to complete before being redirected to www.******.com/xyz.php.
When they have completed the form and been redirected, is it possible for the url to be displayed as www.******.com?
look forward to any advice!

Whilst it may not be best practice you can serve one set of html for an Http Get action and another for the Http Post action. Your get action can return the form and the response to the post action could return your second page.
There are a number of reasons that this is a bad idea, these include
Http Post is meant to cause a state change, not guard access to a
page
It is easily defeated with any sort of proxy or rest client
Navigation in the browser may behave unexpectedly
The user would have to fill in the form for each visit.
It is far better to come up with an alternative solution like generating a temporary access token or setting a cookie to say that they have completed the form.
The best solution is perhaps up for debate, but a simple is solution is to have two .php pages Let's call them index.php and form.php. Your web server is configured to serve up index.php when a GET request is made to www.example.com. (The exact method to do this will depend on your server software).
index.php checks for a cookie and redirects to form.php if the cookie is not set. See this question/answer for more details
form.php responds to a GET request by serving the html for the form and to a POST request by setting the cookie and redirecting back to index.php.

Related

How to forward (not redirect) requests in PHP?

I am working on a simple PHP site that involves needing to be able to forward a request made by the user to another page (note that I said forward, and not redirect). I am aware of how to redirect by manipulating the header variable, but I do not wish to do this, as explained below.
I am trying to write a very simple MVC-patterned mailing list app in PHP, drawing from my knowledge of the same in JSP. One of the things that I appreciated about JSP was that you could both forward or redirect a request. For my purposes, I need forward as I wish to keep the request parameters (whereas redirect will drop them).
Here is a description of what I wish to accomplish:
Retrieve input from a form (ie. /add.php)
Process the input in the page called by the form's action (ie. /process.php) and add a success message to the request object
Forward to another page (ie. /display.php) to display the success message in the request object
The only way I am aware of passing the request message to display is to add it to the request object and then access it from the forwarded page. However, the only way I have had success in transitioning to another page is through using the header method, which drops the request object (from what I can tell). I want to find a way to forward the request (object) to the new page, so that I can access the request variables from the new page.
Is there actually anyway to do this in PHP? Java's getRequestDispatcher.forward() is so nice, but I can't find an equivalent through searching. I've tried several similar questions, including the following, but I've never actually found one where both the question and the answer were what I wanted. Most of the answers seem to have something to do with cURL, but I don't want to actually retrieve a file, but simply forward a request in order to access the request object from another page.
Does PHP have an equivalent of Java's getRequestDispatcher.forward()?
Let me know if I should include anything else?
I believe you can do this with include. Before submitting the form just use, as inclusion, in main page:
include ("add.php"); - where the input forms are
after processing the information, include the display.php in the same way; using this, display.php will use same parameters from header, because is included in the same main page.
briefly: add.php, process.php and display.php will be modules for the mother page, but loaded in different state of form processing.
Hope it helps!
use curl with different method get,post. it will sent a request and also get back the response.
The most common method I see of passing messages to the end user from page to page is called session flashing.
This is when you store a variable temporarily in the session until it is read.
Assuming you already have sessions in use:
On process.php:
$_SESSION['message'] = 'Your data has been saved!';
On display.php:
if (isset($_SESSION['message'])) {
echo $_SESSION['message'];
unset($_SESSION['message']);
}
You could also store the entire Request object in the session.
So if I am aware, PHP provides just basic set of tools in this case. And there is nothing like "forward" in HTTP originally. It is just frameworks' abstraction/idea. There are two ways to achieve that: copying all params from request and doing new real HTTP request (with redirect) or internal forward: so framework would create fake request and call another controller and action without issuing a new physical HTTP request.

PHP: Forward user to external site with post variables

I have a form that users post to but now this form is going to handled on an external website to my application.
I have tried using Location and curl and can not manage to get any of these to function correctly. My goal is to take the $_POST from my form and redirect the user to the external website posting the values.
Is this possible without using an html form and javascript to submit it?
Sending the Location header like that will generate a HTTP 302 response to tell the browser to go elsewhere, however, this will cause the browser to retry with a GET request.
If you want to redirect with the original method and parameters, you need to send code 307 or 308, depending on whether the redirect should be considered temporary or permanent. You can do this in PHP using http_response_code, e.g.
http_response_code(308);
header("Location: www.google.com");

How to Redirect from PHP, receiving an XMLHttp POST request

My questions is about redirection from PHP. I know that we can redirect from a php page to another page by nust using
header("Location: ".$redirectURL);
In my case, one php file receives a XMLHttp POST request, done using javascript in front-end. It manipulates some data in it, and now sets a cookie and then i want to redirect to another page. All pages are in same domain only.
I want to move to the other page, from PHP. Can i do this? Any methods for these?
edit:
Situation is like this, from a login page, i will post the username &password to one php page, where its validated. From validation its understood if the user belongs to a server in some other region(We use a regional divisioning), i will redirect him to that servers login page, but with a cookie set. So that login page understands he's already logged in, and open his homepage.
Thanks for Help :)
You can return URL and do window.location.href assignment in your ajax handler. I think it is the simplest way.
Following update in question: you should remember that you can set cookies for some domain or for subdomains, so, if your regional servers is allocated on completely different domains (for example, myserver.com, myserver.co.uk, myserver.ru) - they will not recognize your cookie and you need some other way to transmit that user is logged in. (One time key in shared storage may be solution)
client : ajax client which do request
serverphp : php file which executing ajax request
1. Redirect client to another page
serverphp return an address client listener redirect client's browser
2. Redirect serverphp to another page
You can do a request to first.php then redirect it to second.php and ajax will get answer from second.php

redirect to a page on a different server and post parameters to it

I am supposed to capture data from a form and send the data to a url on a different server.For eg:-I have a form on a page at the url http://www.form.com/register.php.
I capture all the data from this form and for some reason need this data to be processed on a page on another server at http://www.thereceivingpage.com/process.php.
As of now I am using headers to redirect with the parameters in the query string something like this:-Header(Location:http://www.thereceivingpage.com/process.php?name=alice&address=a1&address2=a2) but I need to send a larger amount of data which wont happen as GET request. Can anyone suggest a better way where in I can post data rather than the data in the query string ...thanks
Use cURL. If you have to redirect to the site, it gets a bit trickier but you can still do it. You can get the cookie and redirect information back from the site and then do a GET redirect using header.
Can you not update the action to simply post directly to that form? Otherwise, you might want to look into something like curl: http://ca.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php
You'll pretty much re-use the header redirect syntax with the parameters but instead you'll tell it to be a post.
redirect to a page on a different server and post parameters to it
thanks to internet standards, that's impossible.
if it's third-party site, let user to interact with it directly. do not interfere between them, it smells
If you want to develop secure applications then you should be aware that http://www.thereceivingpage.com/process.php is vulnerable to Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF), meaning that anyone, from any site, can post form data to process.php.
process.php should be checking for a token (which www.thereceivingpage.com transmitted to the user as part of the form) and should be rejecting form submissions that don't contain the token to prevent submissions coming from anywhere but www.thereceivingpage.com and thus protecting your users from being manipulated into making requests they didn't want to.
In addition to your concern about the size of the GET requests you cause the client to make when redirecting, it's also not a good practice to turn POST requests into GET requests.
The best solution is to completely rethink the notion of delivering a form from one site to be submitted to a different site.
You can manually set headers and send request or you can use curl
see this
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/sending-post-form-data-with-php-curl.html

Jquery $.post and PHP - Prevent the ability to use script outside of main website

I have a PHP script setup using Jquery $.post which would return a response or do an action within the targeted .php file within $.post.
Eg. My page has a form where you type in your Name. Once you hit the submit form button, $.post is called and sends the entered Name field value into "mywebsite.xyz/folder/ajaxscript.php"
If a user was to visit "mywebsite.xyz/folder/ajaxscript.php" directly and somehow POST the data to the script, the script would return a response / do an action, based on the submitted POST data.
The problem is, I don't want others to be able to periodically "call" an action or request a response from my website without using the website directly. Theoretically, right now you could determine what Name values my website allows without even visiting it, or you could call an action without going through the website, by simply visiting "mywebsite.xyz/folder/ajaxscript.php"
So, what measures can I take to prevent this from happening? So far my idea is to ensure that it is a $_POST and not a $_GET - so they cannot manually enter it into the browser, but they could still post data to the script...
Another measure is to apply a session key that expires, and is only valid for X amount of visits until they revisit the website. ~ Or, just have a daily "code" that changes and they'd need to grab this code from the website each day to keep their direct access to the script working (eg. I pass the daily "code" into each post request. I then check that code matches in the ajax php script.)
However, even with these meaures, they will STILL have access to the scripts so long as they know how to POST the data, and also get the new code each day. Also, having a daily code requirement will cause issues when visiting the site at midnight (12:00am) as the code will change and the script will break for someone who is on the website trying to call the script, with the invalid code being passed still.
I have attempted using .htaccess however using:
order allow,deny
deny from all
Prevents legitimate access, and I'd have to add an exception so the website's IP is allowed to access it.. which is a hassle to update I think. Although, if it's the only legitimate solution I guess I'll have to.
If I need to be more clear please let me know.
The problem you describe is similar to Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF). To protect you against this you could put a cookie into the browser and have the cookie value sent in the post form too (by hidden field or just add it to $.post). On server side check both those fields, if they match the request probably came from your site.
However the problem you describe will be quite hard to protect against. Since you could easily make a script (or use Crul) to forge all kinds of requests and send to your server. I don't know how to "only allow a browser and nothing else".
Use the Session variable as you say plus...
As MyGGAN said use a value set in a cookie (CVAL1) before rendering the submit forms. If this cookie is available (JS Code Check will verify) then submit.
On the server side:
If this cookie value exists and the session variable exist then the HTTP Request came from your website.
Note: If the script (form) is to presented under another domain DO NOT allow the cookie value (CVAL1) to be set.
Do not allow HTTP Requests on the Server Side Scripts if extra Http Headers Are not available (like x-requested-with: jquery). JQuery sends a request with an X-* header to the server.
Read more on Croos-Site Request Forgery as MyGGAN suggests.
I am not really sure REMOTE_ADDR would work. Isnt that supposed to be the end users IP addr?
Firstly, you could make use of
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], though not always trust-able.
The only bet that a valid post came from your page would be use a captcha.
try to use HTTP_SEC
// SECURITER
if ($_SERVER[HTTP_SEC_FETCH_SITE] != "same-origin")
die();
if ($_SERVER[HTTP_SEC_FETCH_MODE] != "cors")
die();
if ($_SERVER[HTTP_SEC_FETCH_DEST] != "empty")
die();

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