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some years ago I started using the following code including in the top of my pages. I read that was good and used it. But I was wondering, is it helpful?
$page = "index.php";
$cracktrack = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
$wormprotector = array('chr(', 'chr=', 'chr%20', '%20chr', 'wget%20', '%20wget', 'wget(',
'cmd=', '%20cmd', 'cmd%20', 'rush=', '%20rush', 'rush%20',
'union%20', '%20union', 'union(', 'union=', 'echr(', '%20echr', 'echr%20', 'echr=',
'esystem(', 'esystem%20', 'cp%20', '%20cp', 'cp(', 'mdir%20', '%20mdir', 'mdir(',
'mcd%20', 'mrd%20', 'rm%20', '%20mcd', '%20mrd', '%20rm',
'mcd(', 'mrd(', 'rm(', 'mcd=', 'mrd=', 'mv%20', 'rmdir%20', 'mv(', 'rmdir(',
'chmod(', 'chmod%20', '%20chmod', 'chmod(', 'chmod=', 'chown%20', 'chgrp%20', 'chown(', 'chgrp(',
'locate%20', 'grep%20', 'locate(', 'grep(', 'diff%20', 'kill%20', 'kill(', 'killall',
'passwd%20', '%20passwd', 'passwd(', 'telnet%20', 'vi(', 'vi%20',
'insert%20into', 'select%20', 'nigga(', '%20nigga', 'nigga%20', 'fopen', 'fwrite', '%20like', 'like%20',
'$_request', '$_get', '$request', '$get', '.system', 'HTTP_PHP', '&aim', '%20getenv', 'getenv%20',
'new_password', '&icq','/etc/password','/etc/shadow', '/etc/groups', '/etc/gshadow',
'HTTP_USER_AGENT', 'HTTP_HOST', '/bin/ps', 'wget%20', 'unamex20-a', '/usr/bin/id',
'/bin/echo', '/bin/kill', '/bin/', '/chgrp', '/chown', '/usr/bin', 'g++', 'bin/python',
'bin/tclsh', 'bin/nasm', 'perl%20', 'traceroute%20', 'ping%20', '.pl', '/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm', 'lsof%20',
'/bin/mail', '.conf', 'motd%20', 'HTTP/1.', '.inc.php', 'config.php', 'cgi-', '.eml',
'file://', 'window.open', '<SCRIPT>', 'javascript://','img src', 'img%20src','.jsp','ftp.exe',
'xp_enumdsn', 'xp_availablemedia', 'xp_filelist', 'xp_cmdshell', 'nc.exe', '.htpasswd',
'servlet', '/etc/passwd', 'wwwacl', '~root', '~ftp', '.js', '.jsp', 'admin_', '.history',
'bash_history', '.bash_history', '~nobody', 'server-info', 'server-status', 'reboot%20', 'halt%20',
'powerdown%20', '/home/ftp', '/home/www', 'secure_site, ok', 'chunked', 'org.apache', '/servlet/con',
'<script', '/robot.txt' ,'/perl' ,'mod_gzip_status', 'db_mysql.inc', '.inc', 'select%20from',
'select from', 'drop%20', '.system', 'getenv', 'http_', '_php', 'php_', 'phpinfo()', '<?php', '?>', 'sql=');
$checkworm = str_replace($wormprotector, '*', $cracktrack);
if ($cracktrack != $checkworm){
$cremotead = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$cuseragent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
header("location:$page");
die();
}
In general, I personally wouldn't use this strategy. I'd rather sanitize each and every input. If a user passes .bash_history in the URL I don't care because it's never going to do anything in my script.
I could maybe see something like this being useful if you had some third-party low reliability script that was available for anyone to hit. Even in that scenario though it seems like a semi-reliable band-aid at best.
For applications you write however, this should hopefully be unnecessary.
Although it's great that you're concerned about security, and you're following the principle of treating all input with suspicion, I don't think that list is terribly useful.
It's a rather arbitrary selection of potentially unwanted strings/commands/tags/folder names and other things. It's likely to get out of date over time, and probably is already. Having a generic list like this is never going to catch everything, and may also lend a false sense of security that your application is secure when really it's not.
As another answer has already mentioned, you want to be checking each input you get from your application (whether via query string variables, POST variables or wherever) and validating that it meets your expectations (e.g. if you're expecting a numeric value, is the value passed in numeric?).
Then if you plan to redisplay or re-use that data, you might want to sanitise if further, and strip out things that might potentially be dangerous in the context where it will be used. For example, you might strip out "script" tags if you're going to display the data on a web page.
If you sanitize all user input properly, there's absolutely no need to use a script like this.
Besides that, it's also case sensitive (str_replace vs str_ireplace) which means that I can easily bypass it by making use of a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters. It also only checks the query string, useless against POST requests.
Security is a big concern for me. The last version of my site had little to no security and we experienced a lot of issues so this time around i am looking to have things as secure as possible.
All user input goes through a function that strips tags( allowing <p><b> and trims the string. It is then uploaded to the site using a pdo prepared statement.
I am now going back to output everything and I am wondering what exactly needs to be sanitized. I have a lot of queries that fetch integers ( epoch time,and id's etc. ) should they be sanitized to avoid any issues?
I also have specific sections that use <P> and <b> tags from user input like about me on the user profile etc. Is my Output_paragraph function incorrect?
// Output Sanitation
function output($input) {
$output = htmlspecialchars($input);
return $output;
}
// Paragraph Output Sanitation
function output_paragraph($input) {
$output = htmlspecialchars($input);
$output = htmlspecialchars_decode($output);
return $output;
}
Generally speaking, output should be sanitized when it can't be trusted. In 99% of all cases, this means user input. So raw echoing user input, for instance, is an invitation for someone to use your site to to load, say, an attack file and trick some user into clicking a link to your site that loads said data.
htmlspecialchars is a good start, but you need to make sure you're not trusting user entered data. That means you define what you expect, and then match it to what you can output. Maybe you need strip_tags too. Maybe you need a regex. There's no real "one size fits all" answer to security.
I am trying to prevent xss injection.
So before I submit a form, a javascript function is called
function validatefield(id) {
var description = document.getElementById(id).value;
description = description.replace(/[\"\'][\s]*javascript:(.*)[\"\']/gi, "");
description = description.replace(/script(.*)/gi, "");
description = description.replace(/eval\((.*)\)/gi, "");
document.getElementById(id).value=description;
}
I am wonderng if there's a way to do the same in php before inserting into the mysql? if they get around of the validatefield function.
Thanks
You are looking for preg_replace.
$description = preg_replace('regex pattern', 'regex replacement', $description);
Generally speaking, you can use preg_replace for regex replacements in PHP. But there are a few problems with your design
You shouldn't even bother doing this on the client. It will slow things down without providing security.
You're removing things that are perfectly safe (e.g. "I wrote a script to do such as such"), while ignoring many actual dangers like onclick attributes (see also XSS Cheat Sheet).
Generally speaking, if you want to allow some form of HTML, a whitelist is a better approach. HTML Purifier is a popular tool for implementing this in PHP.
I want to display on screen data send by the user,
remembering it can contain dangerous code, it is the best to clean this data with html entities.
Is there a better way to do html entities, besides this:
$name = clean($name, 40);
$email = clean($email, 40);
$comment = clean($comment, 40);
and this:
$data = array("name", "email," "comment")
function confHtmlEnt($data)
{
return htmlentities($data, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
}
$cleanPost = array_map('confHtmlEnt', $_POST);
if so, how, and how does my wannabe structure
for html entities look?
Thank you for not flaming the newb :-).
"Clean POST", the only problem is you might not know in what context will your data appear. I have a Chat server now that works via browser client and a desktop client and both need data in a different way. So make sure you save the data as "raw" as possible into the DB and then worry about filtering it on output.
Do not encode everything in $_POST/$_GET. HTML-escaping is an output-encoding issue, not an input-checking one.
Call htmlentities (or, usually better, htmlspecialchars) only at the point where you're taking some plain text and concatenating or echoing it into an HTML page. That applies whether the text you are using comes from a submitted parameter, or from the database, or somewhere else completely. Call mysql_real_escape_string only at the point you insert plain text into an SQL string literal.
It's tempting to shove all that escaping stuff in its own box at the top of the script and then forget about it. But text preparation really doesn't work like that, and if you pretend it does you'll find your database irreparably full of double-encoded crud, backslashes on your HTML page and security holes you didn't spot because you were taking data from a source other than the (encoded) parameters.
You can make the burden of remembering to mysql_real_escape_string go away by using mysqli's parameterised queries or another higher-level data access layer. You can make the burden of typing htmlspecialchars every time less bothersome by defining a shorter-named function for it, eg.:
<?php
function h($s) {
echo(htmlspecialchars($s, ENT_QUOTES));
}
?>
<h1> Blah blah </h1>
<p>
Blah blah <?php h($title); ?> blah.
</p>
or using a different templating engine that encodes HTML by default.
If you wish to convert the five special HTML characters to their equivalent entities, use the following method:
function filter_HTML($mixed)
{
return is_array($mixed)
? array_map('filter_HTML',$mixed)
: htmlspecialchars($mixed,ENT_QUOTES);
}
That would work for both UTF-8 or single-byte encoded string.
But if the string is UTF-8 encoded, make sure to filter out any invalid characters sequence, prior to using the filter_HTML() function:
function make_valid_UTF8($str)
{
return iconv('UTF-8','UTF-8//IGNORE',$str)
}
Also see: http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets#character_sets_character_encoding_issues
You need to clean every element bevor displaying it. I do it usually with a function and an array like your secound example.
If you use a framework with a template engine, there is quite likely a possibility to auto-encode strings. Apart from that, what's simpler than calling a function and getting the entity-"encoded" string back?
Check out the filter libraries in php, in particular filter_input_array.
filter_input_array(INPUT_POST, FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS);
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I have PHP configured so that magic quotes are on and register globals are off.
I do my best to always call htmlentities() for anything I am outputing that is derived from user input.
I also occasionally seach my database for common things used in xss attached such as...
<script
What else should I be doing and how can I make sure that the things I am trying to do are always done.
Escaping input is not the best you can do for successful XSS prevention. Also output must be escaped. If you use Smarty template engine, you may use |escape:'htmlall' modifier to convert all sensitive characters to HTML entities (I use own |e modifier which is alias to the above).
My approach to input/output security is:
store user input not modified (no HTML escaping on input, only DB-aware escaping done via PDO prepared statements)
escape on output, depending on what output format you use (e.g. HTML and JSON need different escaping rules)
I'm of the opinion that one shouldn't escape anything during input, only on output. Since (most of the time) you can not assume that you know where that data is going. Example, if you have form that takes data that later on appears in an email that you send out, you need different escaping (otherwise a malicious user could rewrite your email-headers).
In other words, you can only escape at the very last moment the data is "leaving" your application:
List item
Write to XML file, escape for XML
Write to DB, escape (for that particular DBMS)
Write email, escape for emails
etc
To go short:
You don't know where your data is going
Data might actually end up in more than one place, needing different escaping mechanism's BUT NOT BOTH
Data escaped for the wrong target is really not nice. (E.g. get an email with the subject "Go to Tommy\'s bar".)
Esp #3 will occur if you escape data at the input layer (or you need to de-escape it again, etc).
PS: I'll second the advice for not using magic_quotes, those are pure evil!
There are a lot of ways to do XSS (See http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html) and it's very hard to catch.
I personally delegate this to the current framework I'm using (Code Igniter for example). While not perfect, it might catch more than my hand made routines ever do.
This is a great question.
First, don't escape text on input except to make it safe for storage (such as being put into a database). The reason for this is you want to keep what was input so you can contextually present it in different ways and places. Making changes here can compromise your later presentation.
When you go to present your data filter out what shouldn't be there. For example, if there isn't a reason for javascript to be there search for it and remove it. An easy way to do that is to use the strip_tags function and only present the html tags you are allowing.
Next, take what you have and pass it thought htmlentities or htmlspecialchars to change what's there to ascii characters. Do this based on context and what you want to get out.
I'd, also, suggest turning off Magic Quotes. It is has been removed from PHP 6 and is considered bad practice to use it. Details at http://us3.php.net/magic_quotes
For more details check out http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html
This isn't a complete answer but, hopefully enough to help you get started.
rikh Writes:
I do my best to always call htmlentities() for anything I am outputing that is derived from user input.
See Joel's essay on Making Code Look Wrong for help with this
Template library. Or at least, that is what template libraries should do.
To prevent XSS all output should be encoded. This is not the task of the main application / control logic, it should solely be handled by the output methods.
If you sprinkle htmlentities() thorughout your code, the overall design is wrong. And as you suggest, you might miss one or two spots.
That's why the only solution is rigorous html encoding -> when output vars get written into a html/xml stream.
Unfortunately, most php template libraries only add their own template syntax, but don't concern themselves with output encoding, or localization, or html validation, or anything important. Maybe someone else knows a proper template library for php?
I rely on PHPTAL for that.
Unlike Smarty and plain PHP, it escapes all output by default. This is a big win for security, because your site won't become vurnelable if you forget htmlspecialchars() or |escape somewhere.
XSS is HTML-specific attack, so HTML output is the right place to prevent it. You should not try pre-filtering data in the database, because you could need to output data to another medium which doesn't accept HTML, but has its own risks.
Escaping all user input is enough for most sites. Also make sure that session IDs don't end up in the URL so they can't be stolen from the Referer link to another site. Additionally, if you allow your users to submit links, make sure no javascript: protocol links are allowed; these would execute a script as soon as the user clicks on the link.
If you are concerned about XSS attacks, encoding your output strings to HTML is the solution. If you remember to encode every single output character to HTML format, there is no way to execute a successful XSS attack.
Read more:
Sanitizing user data: How and where to do it
Personally, I would disable magic_quotes. In PHP5+ it is disabled by default and it is better to code as if it is not there at all as it does not escape everything and it will be removed from PHP6.
Next, depending on what type of user data you are filtering will dictate what to do next e.g. if it is just text e.g. a name, then strip_tags(trim(stripslashes())); it or to check for ranges use regular expressions.
If you expect a certain range of values, create an array of the valid values and only allow those values through (in_array($userData, array(...))).
If you are checking numbers use is_numeric to enforce whole numbers or cast to a specific type, that should prevent people trying to send strings in stead.
If you have PHP5.2+ then consider looking at filter() and making use of that extension which can filter various data types including email addresses. Documentation is not particularly good, but is improving.
If you have to handle HTML then you should consider something like PHP Input Filter or HTML Purifier. HTML Purifier will also validate HTML for conformance. I am not sure if Input Filter is still being developed. Both will allow you to define a set of tags that can be used and what attributes are allowed.
Whatever you decide upon, always remember, never ever trust anything coming into your PHP script from a user (including yourself!).
All of these answers are great, but fundamentally, the solution to XSS will be to stop generating HTML documents by string manipulation.
Filtering input is always a good idea for any application.
Escaping your output using htmlentities() and friends should work as long as it's used properly, but this is the HTML equivalent of creating a SQL query by concatenating strings with mysql_real_escape_string($var) - it should work, but fewer things can validate your work, so to speak, compared to an approach like using parameterized queries.
The long-term solution should be for applications to construct the page internally, perhaps using a standard interface like the DOM, and then to use a library (like libxml) to handle the serialization to XHTML/HTML/etc. Of course, we're a long ways away from that being popular and fast enough, but in the meantime we have to build our HTML documents via string operations, and that's inherently more risky.
“Magic quotes” is a palliative remedy for some of the worst XSS flaws which works by escaping everything on input, something that's wrong by design. The only case where one would want to use it is when you absolutely must use an existing PHP application known to be written carelessly with regard to XSS. (In this case you're in a serious trouble even with “magic quotes”.) When developing your own application, you should disable “magic quotes” and follow XSS-safe practices instead.
XSS, a cross-site scripting vulnerability, occurs when an application includes strings from external sources (user input, fetched from other websites, etc) in its [X]HTML, CSS, ECMAscript or other browser-parsed output without proper escaping, hoping that special characters like less-than (in [X]HTML), single or double quotes (ECMAscript) will never appear. The proper solution to it is to always escape strings according to the rules of the output language: using entities in [X]HTML, backslashes in ECMAscript etc.
Because it can be hard to keep track of what is untrusted and has to be escaped, it's a good idea to always escape everything that is a “text string” as opposed to “text with markup” in a language like HTML. Some programming environments make it easier by introducing several incompatible string types: “string” (normal text), “HTML string” (HTML markup) and so on. That way, a direct implicit conversion from “string” to “HTML string” would be impossible, and the only way a string could become HTML markup is by passing it through an escaping function.
“Register globals”, though disabling it is definitely a good idea, deals with a problem entirely different from XSS.
I find that using this function helps to strip out a lot of possible xss attacks:
<?php
function h($string, $esc_type = 'htmlall')
{
switch ($esc_type) {
case 'css':
$string = str_replace(array('<', '>', '\\'), array('<', '>', '/'), $string);
// get rid of various versions of javascript
$string = preg_replace(
'/j\s*[\\\]*\s*a\s*[\\\]*\s*v\s*[\\\]*\s*a\s*[\\\]*\s*s\s*[\\\]*\s*c\s*[\\\]*\s*r\s*[\\\]*\s*i\s*[\\\]*\s*p\s*[\\\]*\s*t\s*[\\\]*\s*:/i',
'blocked', $string);
$string = preg_replace(
'/#\s*[\\\]*\s*i\s*[\\\]*\s*m\s*[\\\]*\s*p\s*[\\\]*\s*o\s*[\\\]*\s*r\s*[\\\]*\s*t/i',
'blocked', $string);
$string = preg_replace(
'/e\s*[\\\]*\s*x\s*[\\\]*\s*p\s*[\\\]*\s*r\s*[\\\]*\s*e\s*[\\\]*\s*s\s*[\\\]*\s*s\s*[\\\]*\s*i\s*[\\\]*\s*o\s*[\\\]*\s*n\s*[\\\]*\s*/i',
'blocked', $string);
$string = preg_replace('/b\s*[\\\]*\s*i\s*[\\\]*\s*n\s*[\\\]*\s*d\s*[\\\]*\s*i\s*[\\\]*\s*n\s*[\\\]*\s*g:/i', 'blocked', $string);
return $string;
case 'html':
//return htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_NOQUOTES);
return str_replace(array('<', '>'), array('<' , '>'), $string);
case 'htmlall':
return htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES);
case 'url':
return rawurlencode($string);
case 'query':
return urlencode($string);
case 'quotes':
// escape unescaped single quotes
return preg_replace("%(?<!\\\\)'%", "\\'", $string);
case 'hex':
// escape every character into hex
$s_return = '';
for ($x=0; $x < strlen($string); $x++) {
$s_return .= '%' . bin2hex($string[$x]);
}
return $s_return;
case 'hexentity':
$s_return = '';
for ($x=0; $x < strlen($string); $x++) {
$s_return .= '&#x' . bin2hex($string[$x]) . ';';
}
return $s_return;
case 'decentity':
$s_return = '';
for ($x=0; $x < strlen($string); $x++) {
$s_return .= '&#' . ord($string[$x]) . ';';
}
return $s_return;
case 'javascript':
// escape quotes and backslashes, newlines, etc.
return strtr($string, array('\\'=>'\\\\',"'"=>"\\'",'"'=>'\\"',"\r"=>'\\r',"\n"=>'\\n','</'=>'<\/'));
case 'mail':
// safe way to display e-mail address on a web page
return str_replace(array('#', '.'),array(' [AT] ', ' [DOT] '), $string);
case 'nonstd':
// escape non-standard chars, such as ms document quotes
$_res = '';
for($_i = 0, $_len = strlen($string); $_i < $_len; $_i++) {
$_ord = ord($string{$_i});
// non-standard char, escape it
if($_ord >= 126){
$_res .= '&#' . $_ord . ';';
} else {
$_res .= $string{$_i};
}
}
return $_res;
default:
return $string;
}
}
?>
Source
Make you any session cookies (or all cookies) you use HttpOnly. Most browsers will hide the cookie value from JavaScript in that case. User could still manually copy cookies, but this helps prevent direct script access. StackOverflow had this problem durning beta.
This isn't a solution, just another brick in the wall
Don't trust user input
Escape all free-text output
Don't use magic_quotes; see if there's a DBMS-specfic variant, or use PDO
Consider using HTTP-only cookies where possible to avoid any malicious script being able to hijack a session
You should at least validate all data going into the database. And try to validate all data leaving the database too.
mysql_real_escape_string is good to prevent SQL injection, but XSS is trickier.
You should preg_match, stip_tags, or htmlentities where possible!
The best current method for preventing XSS in a PHP application is HTML Purifier (http://htmlpurifier.org/). One minor drawback to it is that it's a rather large library and is best used with an op code cache like APC. You would use this in any place where untrusted content is being outputted to the screen. It is much more thorough that htmlentities, htmlspecialchars, filter_input, filter_var, strip_tags, etc.
Use an existing user-input sanitization library to clean all user-input. Unless you put a lot of effort into it, implementing it yourself will never work as well.
I find the best way is using a class that allows you to bind your code so you never have to worry about manually escaping your data.
It is difficult to implement a thorough sql injection/xss injection prevention on a site that doesn't cause false alarms. In a CMS the end user might want to use <script> or <object> that links to items from another site.
I recommend having all users install FireFox with NoScript ;-)