i know this sounds really common and so trivial but , am having a challenge here. I have a web site with Zend/Doctrine and i use ckeditor for the backend management. after uploading the site i've realized that during edit testing the look and feel of the site is messed up.
with the help of firebug, i've seen that there are slashes all over the html. after inline edition, the look and feel came back to normal. There are so many files , i can't think of doing other decoding before outputting data from mysql.
What options do i have to solve this problem. the site is up already and i feel a bit unconfortable about this. Can anyone give a hint? thanks
It might be magic_quotes_gpc. Can you verify that it's turned off?
Here is a way to turn it off:
http://php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.disabling.php
Sets the magic_quotes state for GPC (Get/Post/Cookie) operations. When magic_quotes are on, all ' (single-quote), " (double quote), \ (backslash) and NUL's are escaped with a backslash automatically.
Also, are you using prepared statements? PHP PDO/MySQLI will escape automatically for you. Depends on the type of queries you're using.
It seems like you're data is getting double escaped before being inserted into your database. Are you using mysql_real_escape_string or addslashes before inserting data into the database? If so, maybe you want to use stripslashes before you insert your data like so:
mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($data));
Or else you could theoretically call stripslashes after you take the data out of the database:
stripslashes($data);
The second approach is less desirable, though. It would be better to have the data properly stored in the database.
I thank every one for the help. Really the accepted solution should be the one from #Stanislav Palatnik . just that it didn't work with my .htaccess. the hosting server was nice enough to put a php.ini in my public_html allowing me to change it. So +1 to #Stanislav Palatnik because he pointed out the issue. i also found interesting information i thought i would share in case someone found himself in my situation.
info from: http://support.godaddy.com/groups/web-hosting/forum/topic/how-to-turn-off-magic_quotes_gpc/
Yes – the solution below worked for me:
(1) First of all do not try to turn off the magic quotes in your .htaccess file, it won’t work on godaddy.
(2) Second, if you’re running PHP5 on your account, rename your php.ini file to php5.ini, make sure it’s in your root folder.
(3) Third, make sure all the lines in your php5.ini file end in a semi colon ;
(4) Fourth, add this line to your php5.ini file:
magic_quotes_gpc = Off;
on the same page someone said it shouldn't be only magic_quotes_gpc only but other ones aswell like shown below:
magic_quotes_gpc = Off;
magic_quotes_runtime = Off;
magic_quotes_sybase = Off;
Hope this helped someone. Special thanks to #Stanislav Palatnik
In case this is a magic quotes problem and as i recall you only having access to your application.ini, you might add the following and give it a try
phpSettings.magic_quotes_gpc = 0
phpSettings.magic_quotes_runtime = 0
This still requires your user / usergroup to be allowed to change default php settings ;)
<?php
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
$process = array(&$_GET, &$_POST, &$_COOKIE, &$_REQUEST);
while (list($key, $val) = each($process)) {
foreach ($val as $k => $v) {
unset($process[$key][$k]);
if (is_array($v)) {
$process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = $v;
$process[] = &$process[$key][stripslashes($k)];
} else {
$process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = stripslashes($v);
}
}
}
unset($process);}
?>
add this to your php page which has insert/update query :)
I'm using PHP and MySQL to power a basic forum. When users use the apostrophe (') or insert links into their post, the mysql_real_escape_string function is adding \ to the text. When displaying the post, the links don't work, and all the apostrophe's have a \ before it.
Is the problem that I am not doing something before outputting the text or is the issue that I'm not cleaning the data properly before writing to MySQL?
Are magicquotes turned on? You can check quickly by creating a PHP page like so:
<?php var_dump(get_magic_quotes_gpc()) ?>
If the page says something like int(1), then the culprit isn't mysql_real_escape_string, but PHP itself. It was a security feature, but not very secure, and mostly just annoying. Before you sanitize each variable, you first need to undo the slashing with stripslashes.
You can also turn off magic quotes by using this:
if ( version_compare(PHP_VERSION, '5.3.0', '<') ) {
set_magic_quotes_runtime(0);
}
It will turn magic quotes off when your server is running any version of php less than 5.3.0.
I have a form that, among other things, accepts an image for upload and sticks it in the database. Previously I had a function filtering the POSTed data that was basically:
function processInput($stuff) {
$formdata = $stuff;
$formdata = htmlentities($formdata, ENT_QUOTES);
return "'" . mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($formdata)) . "'";
}
When, in an effort to fix some weird entities that weren't getting converted properly I changed the function to (all that has changed is I added that 'UTF-8' bit in htmlentities):
function processInput($stuff) {
$formdata = $stuff;
$formdata = htmlentities($formdata, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); //added UTF-8
return "'" . mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($formdata)) . "'";
}
And now images will not upload.
What would be causing this? Simply removing the 'UTF-8' bit allows images to upload properly but then some of the MS Word entities that users put into the system show up as gibberish. What is going on?
**EDIT: Since I cannot do much to change the code on this beast I was able to slap a bandaid on by using htmlspecialchars() rather than htmlentities() and that seems to at least leave the image data untouched while converting things like quotes, angle brackets, etc.
bobince's advice is excellent but in this case I cannot now spend the time needed to fix the messy legacy code in this project. Most stuff I deal with is object oriented and framework based but now I see first hand what people mean when they talk about "spaghetti code" in PHP.
function processInput($stuff) {
$formdata = $stuff;
$formdata = htmlentities($formdata, ENT_QUOTES);
return "'" . mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($formdata)) . "'";
}
This function represents a basic misunderstanding of string processing, one common to PHP programmers.
SQL-escaping, HTML-escaping and input validation are three separate functions, to be used at different stages of your script. It makes no sense to try to do them all in one go; it will only result in characters that are ‘special’ to any one of the processes getting mangled when used in the other parts of the script. You can try to tinker with this function to try to fix mangling in one part of the app, but you'll break something else.
Why are images being mangled? Well, it's not immediately clear via what path image data is going from a $_FILES temporary upload file to the database. If this function is involved at any point though, it's going to completely ruin the binary content of an image file. Backslashes removed and HTML-escaped... no image could survive that.
mysql_real_escape_string is for escaping some text for inclusion in a MySQL string literal. It should be used always-and-only when making an SQL string literal with inserted text, and not globally applied to input. Because some things that come in in the input aren't going immediately or solely to the database. For example, if you echo one of the input values to the HTML page, you'll find you get a bunch of unwanted backslashes in it when it contains characters like '. This is how you end up with pages full of runaway backslashes.
(Even then, parameterised queries are generally preferable to manual string hacking and mysql_real_escape_string. They hide the details of string escaping from you so you don't get confused by them.)
htmlentities is for escaping text for inclusion in an HTML page. It should be used always-and-only in the output templating bit of your PHP. It is inappropriate to run it globally over all your input because not everything is going to end up in an HTML page or solely in an HTML page, and most probably it's going to go to the database first where you absolutely don't want a load of < and & rubbish making your text fail to search or substring reliably.
(Even then, htmlspecialchars is generally preferable to htmlentities as it only encodes the characters that really need it. htmlentities will add needless escaping, and unless you tell it the right encoding it'll also totally mess up all your non-ASCII characters. htmlentities should almost never be used.)
As for stripslashes... well, you sometimes need to apply that to input, but only when the idiotic magic_quotes_gpc option is turned on. You certainly shouldn't apply it all the time, only when you detect magic_quotes_gpc is on. It is long deprecated and thankfully dying out, so it's probably just as good to bomb out with an error message if you detect it being turned on. Then you could chuck the whole processInput thing away.
To summarise:
At start time, do no global input processing. You can do application-specific validation here if you want, like checking a phone number is just numbers, or removing control characters from text or something, but there should be no escaping happening here.
When making an SQL query with a string literal in it, use SQL-escaping on the value as it goes into the string: $query= "SELECT * FROM t WHERE name='".mysql_real_escape_string($name)."'";. You can define a function with a shorter name to do the escaping to save some typing. Or, more readably, parameterisation.
When making HTML output with strings from the input or the database or elsewhere, use HTML-escaping, eg.: <p>Hello, <?php echo htmlspecialchars($name); ?>!</p>. Again, you can define a function with a short name to do echo htmlspecialchars to save on typing.
I'm just about ready to cry. I have read the php.net manual page, tried a dozen Google searches with various phrases, and scanned hundreds of stackoverflow threads. I have seen this method in use, but it just doesn't work for me. It seems so basic. I have a couple related questions or problems I don't know how to find answers to.
The important part of the PHP file looks like this:
switch() {
…other cases…
default:
$tpl['title'] = "Newsletter Signup";
$tpl['description'] = "Newsletter description";
$tpl['page-content'] = file_get_contents('signup.html');
}
$tpl_src = addslashes(file_get_contents('index.tpl'));
eval("\$html = \"$tpl_src\";");
echo $html;
My index.tpl file includes lines like these:
<title>{$tpl['title']}</title>
<meta name="description" content="{$tpl['description']}" />
nav, etc…
<div id="main-content"> {$tpl['page-content']} </div>
I like how neat and clean the code is, without a whole bunch of extra <?=…?>'s.
First, when curly brackets {} appear in a string, what is that called? I might be able to look it up and learn how to use them if I knew.
Next, this just doesn't work at all. If I remove the single quotes from the variable keys, it's good, but php.net says you should never do that in case my name becomes a language constant at some point. Fair enough. But how do I fix this? I like using an array for the vars in case I want to build an evalTemplate subroutine and can just pass $tpl to it.
Lastly, $tpl['page-content'] doesn't print out. The variable is set okay; I can use echo $tpl['page-content'] to test, but it appears as a single blank line in the final HTML.
I'm sure there's just some aspect of the language I don't know yet. Any help is much appreciated!!
As Volker pointed out, addslashes seems to be an issue. Try addcslashes instead. Also, I'd strongly recommend making this a function, to simplify sanitisation / parsing:
function render ($file, $vars)
{
// .. extra sanitisation, validation, et al.
$_html = '';
$_raw_file = addcslashes (file_get_contents ($file), '"\\');
extract ($vars, EXTR_SKIP);
eval ('$_html = "'.$_raw_file.'"');
return $_html;
}
And called thus:
switch() {
// …other cases…
default:
$tpl['title'] = "Newsletter Signup";
$tpl['description'] = "Newsletter description";
$tpl['page-content'] = render ('signup.html');
}
echo render ('index.tpl', $tpl);
PS: The use of extract above means that your vars will simply be $title, not $tpl['title'], etc.
Usually you don't use the '' string delimiters in string variable expansion. I.e. "$tpl[content]" instead of "$tpl['content']".
As for as the braces, they delimit variable's when identifier characters may come straight before or after the name. For example:
$item = "Cup";
$text = "I smashed four $items"; // won't work
$text = "I smashed four {$item}s"; // will work.
// 2nd output: "I smashed four Cups"
addslashes() adds slashes before both single- and double-quotes within the string.
The code generated for your example would be
$html = "<title>{$tpl[\'title\']}</title>
<meta name=\"description\" content=\"{$tpl[\'description\']}\" />
nav, etc…¦
<div id=\"main-content\"> {$tpl[\'page-content\']} </div>";
And {$tpl[\'title\']} doesn't parse well.
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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 ;-)