PHP: How to prevent direct access to JavaScript files? - php

I have seen that some web sites have a PHP script to redirect the user to another web page if they try to access JavaScript files directly. How is that done?

Unfortunately, as the previous answers have stated, you can't prevent one from seeing the contents of a JS file; if you could do that, how is the browser supposed to parse it?
The next best thing to do is to "Obfuscate" it using something like http://www.javascriptobfuscator.com/default.aspx
This will convert your human-readable code into a bunch of character codes and obscure function names. The Obfuscator I linked to generates a unique ID and bases its encryption on that ID, making it harder to decrypt.
However, this isn't fool-proof, and someone who really wants to get at your JS, for whatever reason, will do it. Anything you really don't want users to have access too should be done server-side. ;)

No, that's not possible.
There are plenty of ways how to get JS files. Nothing helps in protection.

Javascript is meant to be client side. That means it always gets executed on the browser which is local and thus can not be hidden.

Related

How to prevent direct access of script

I have a php script called from html tag, as
<script src="js/myscript.php"> </script>
Please help me finding a php function to detect if this script is called directly or from script tag of my website.
I wish to prevent someone pasting link to address bar and getting content of myscript.php, as
http://www.mysite.com/js/myscript.php
Not much you can do here other then check the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], which by no means is a secure way of doing this. Its pretty much impossible to do what your asking as there are simple ways around this.
Your best bet would be to obfuscate the code which would make it harder to read should they load the URL, but again, there are ways around this also.
If you are using javascript, you CANNOT prevent everyone being able to see it. You can't expect a browser to be able to do what the script tells it to do without telling it what to do :)
Your file ext is a PHP, but it is in a js folder. If the output is only JS, you can't stop people being able to view it in any real reliable manner.

Javascript Passing inline variables to external : security issue?

So I've looked around to try to find some posts on this and there are many but none that address my specific question (that I could find).
So essentially I need to get some data from my database to my external javascript document.
What I am currently doing is something like this...
<?php for (loop through products): ?>
<script>
var $each_image_information = new Array(
"<?php echo $getVariable; ?>",
"<?php echo $getVariable; ?>");
</script>
<?php endfor ?>
And then my external .js file accesses the variable $each_image_information. I realize this is somewhat messy code since these variables are somewhat global - but I'm not sure I know of a possible (with my skillset) alternative.
My real question is if this lends any security holes for the website I am implementing it on. Since these values are echo'd from the database to the inline javascript file, can those variables be manipulated?
This may be a foolish question but I have had past experience with SQL injection when I had no idea that those were possible, so I am trying to err on the safe side.
Thanks in advance!
Ok, to understand this problem you have to understand that Javascript is client-side. That means anyone can do anything they want on it, so the answer to "can those variables be manipulated?" is a resounding yes! If you want just go download Firebug, and you can start changing them to the latest Google logo if you want :-)
But, none of that matters, because if a user can mess with their own client-side stuff, that's no security hole. What you need to be worried about is user A getting scary code on user B's client. That is only a problem if user A can pick the file names of these images, because then they can name their image insert scary code here and that code could get run on user B's computer.
But as long as you control the image file names (or just escape any JS in them), you should be all good.
This is what you are doing
Sql -> Php -> Javascript
As long as you are not doing this
Sql -> Php -> Javascript -> Php -> Sql, then you should be fine from an SQL injection point of view.
Javascript variables are ALWAYS modifiable, and if you are using them inside a SQL query you should sanitize them first (mysql_escape_string() or something similar).
So long as you don't provide a path back into your database, you should be fine.
Keep in mind that if you don't have a path back into your database, but may have one in the future, that you might want to do some obscuration of primary keys on your data; that's always a good idea just to make sure that your internal database representation isn't exposed.

How to disable or encrypt "View Source" for my site

Is there any way to disable or encrypt "View Source" for my site so that I can secure my code?
Fero,
Your question doesn't make much sense. The "View Source" is showing the HTML source—if you encrypt that, the user (and the browser) won't be able to read your content anymore.
If you want to protect your PHP source, then there are tools like Zend Guard. It would encrypt your source code and make it hard to reverse engineer.
If you want to protect your JavaScript, you can minify it with, for example, YUI Compressor. It won't prevent the user from using your code since, like the user, the browser needs to be able to read the code somehow, but at least it would make the task more difficult.
If you are more worried about user privacy, you should use SSL to make sure the sensitive information is encrypted when on the wire.
Finally, it is technically possible to encrypt the content of a page and use JavaScript to decrypt it, but since this relies on JavaScript, an experienced user could defeat this in a couple of minutes. Plus all these problems would appear:
Search engines won't be able to index your pages...
Users with JavaScript disabled would see the encrypted page
It could perform really poorly depending the amount of content you have
So I don't advise you to use this solution.
You can't really disable that because eventually the browser will still need to read and parse the source in order to output.
If there is something SO important in your source code, I recommend you hide it on server side.
Even if you encrypt or obfuscate your HTML source, eventually we still can eval and view it. Using Firebug for instance, we can see source code no matter what.
If you are selling PHP software, you can consider Software as a Service (SaaS).
So you want to encrypt your HTML source. You can encrypt it using some javascript tool, but beware that if the user is smart enough, he will always be able to decrypt it doing the same thing that the browser should do: run the javascript and see the generated HTML.
EDIT: See this HTML scrambler as an example on how to encrypt it:
http://www.voormedia.com/en/tools/html-obfuscate-scrambler.php
EDIT2: And .. see this one for how to decrypt it :)
http://www.gooby.ca/decrypt/
Short answer is not, html is an open text format what ever you do if the page renders people will be able to see your source code. You can use javascript to disable the right click which will work on some browsers but any one wanting to use your code will know how to avoid this. You can also have javascrpit emit the html after storing this encoded, this will have bad impacts on development, accessibility, and speed of load. After all that any one with firebug installed will still be able to see you html code.
There is also very really a lot of value in your html, your real ip is in your server code which stays safe and sound on your server.
This is fundamentally impossible. As (almost) everybody has said, the web browser of your user needs to be able to read your html and Javascript, and browsers exist to serve their users -- not you.
What this means is that no matter what you do there is eventually going to be something on a user's machine that looks like:
<html>
<body>
<div id="my secret page layout trick"> ...
</div>
</body>
</html>
because otherwise there is nothing to show the user. If that exists on the client-side, then you have lost control of it. Even if you managed to convince every browser-maker on the planet to not make that available through a "view source" option -- which is, you know, unlikely -- the text will still exist on that user's machine, and somebody will figure out how to get to it. And that will never happen, browsers will always exist to serve their users before all others. (Hopefully)
The same thing is true for all of your Javascript. Let me say it again: nothing that you send to a user is secure or secret from that user. The encryption via Javascript hack is stupid and cannot work in any meaningful sense.
(Well, actually, Flash and Silverlight ship binaries, but I don't think that they're encrypted. So they are at the least irritating to get data out of.)
As others have said, the only way to keep something secret from your users is to not give it to them: put the logic in your server and make sure that it is never sent. For example, all of the code that you write in PHP (or Python/Ruby/Perl/Java/C...) should never be seen by your users. This is e.g. why Google still has a business. What they give you is fundamentally uninteresting compared to what they never send to you. And, because they realize this, they try to make most things that they send you as open as useful as possible. Because it's the infrastructure -- the Terrabyte-huge maps database and pathfinding software, as opposed to the snazzy map that you can click and drag -- that you are trading your privacy for.
Another example: I'm not sure if you remember how many tricks people employed in the early days of the web to try and keep people from saving images to disk. When was the last time you ran across one of those? Know why? Because once data is on your user's machine, she controls it. Not you.
So, in short: if you want to keep something secret from your user, don't give it to her.
You cant. The browser needs the source to render the page. If the user user wishes the user may have the browser show the source. Firefox can also show you the DOM of the page. You can obfuscate the source but not encrypt or lock the user out.
Also why would you want this, it seem like a lame ass thing to do :P
I don't think there is a way to do this. Because if you encrypt how the browser will understand the HTML?
No. The browsers offer no ability for the HTML/javascript to disable that feature (thankfully). Plus even if you could the HTML is still transmitted in plain text ready for a HTTP sniffer to read.
Best you could do would be to somehow obscure the HTML/javascript to make it hard to read. But then debuggers like Firebug and IE 8's debugger will reconstruct it from the DOM making it easy to read,
You can, in fact, disable the right click function. It is useless to do so, however, as most browsers now have built in inspector tools which show the source anyway. Not to mention that other workarounds (such as saving the page, then opening the source, or simply using hotkeys) exist for viewing the html source. Tutorials for disabling the right click function abound across the web, so a quick google search will point you in the right direction if you fell an overwhelming urge to waste your time.
There is no full proof way.
But You can fool many people using simple Hack using below methods:
"window.history.pushState()" and
adding oncontextmenu="return false" in body tag as attribute
Detail here - http://freelancer.usercv.com/blog/28/hide-website-source-code-in-view-source-using-stupid-one-line-chinese-hack-code
You can also use “javascript obfuscation” to further complicate things, but it won’t hide it completely.
“Inspect Element” can reveal everything beyond view-source.
Yes, you can have your whole website being rendered dynamically via javascript which would be encrypted/packed/obfuscated like there is no tomorrow.

How to invoke js without displaying the code

I was wondering, I want to plant a JS tracking code (analytics) in a few websites to track their traffic. But I don't want that when viewing the site's source code people will be able to see that I've embedded the JS tracking code there.
Is it possible? Maybe by using an Apache/PHP trick?
Thanks,
Roy.
Nope it's not possible, for the browser to execute any code at least some of it must be initially visible, even if that code is to then retrieve the tracking code itself.
In addition all the modern web developer tools provide access to any code that is loaded so anyone can use those to see anything you've attempted to load discretely.
The more important question is why you want to hide that you're tracking people?
It's not absolutely possible with Javascript. Javascript always runs in the context of the user's browser, so it always means that the user will have access to see the script. You can obfuscate it, or try some tricks similar to anti-hotlinking on the JS code, but it will still be relatively easy for someone to figure out what the code does with a simple tool like Firebug.
You can, however, track your traffic without JavaScript. Analytics uses JavaScript for portability, and because some of the data it accesses can only be accessed with JavaScript. However, there are more passive ways of tracking your traffic which don't require JavaScript, such as any log analyzer like AWstats. You just don't get some of the cool features of Analytics.
It's not possible, but you could just name your script file something innocent like "mouseover.js".
It's not possible: JS code has to be run by the web browser, which means that -- which ever way you try put it -- it has to be readable by the browser and thus by anyone that inspects the page.
You could try obfuscating the JS, but that won't stop anyone that is determined to see what's happening.
You could ask yourself what the odds are that more than a few people will check whether you're tracking them -- I wouldn't expect it.
You can't technically hide the code... But you can scramble it so it's not readable to anybody. I used http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/form by Dan Benjamin to scrable some JS on my page (in this case I scrambled my email address). It scrambles it so the browser can execute it, but it's not humanly readable...
Then you can just call it as a function like I did in from this script http://www.jamischarles.com/css_js/email_encoder.js. Give it a try.

Taking a hashed URL and sending it to a new URL

For example, I'd like to have my registration, about and contact pages resolve to different content, but via hash tags:
three links one each to the registration, contact and about page -
www.site.com/index.php#about
www.site.com/index.php#registration
www.site.com/index.php#contact
Is there a way using Javascript or PHP to resolve these pages to the separated content?
The hash is not sent to the server, so you can only do it in Javascript.
Check the value of location.hash.
There's no server-side way to do it. You could work with AJAX, but this will break the site for non-javascript users. The best way would probably be to have server-side content URLs (index.php?page=<page_id>) and rewrite these locally with JavaScript (to #<page_id>) and handle the content loading with AJAX then. That way you can have your hash-URLs for JS-enabled devices and everybody else can still use the site.
It does however require a bit of redundance because you need to provide the same content twice, once for inclusion via AJAX and once with the proper layout and everything via PHP.
If you just want hash URLs for aesthetic reasons, but don't want to rely on JS, you're out of luck. The semantics of URLs are against you: fragment IDs shouldn't really affect the content the URL is referring to, merely the fragment within that content. AJAX URLs are changing those semantics, but there's no good reason to do that if you don't have to.
I suppose you probably have a good reason, but can I ask, why would you do this? It breaks the widely understood standard of how hashs in URLs are supposed to work, and its just begging for trouble for interoperability with other clients, down the road.
You can use PHP's Global $_REQUEST variables to grab the requested URL and parse out the hashtag...

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