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Excuse me if this seems too vague to be posted on Stackoverflow.
My company hired three developers to implement a classified ads system, using PHP and MySQL. They’ve been working for little more than a month, without using a framework (they argued against using one) and basic functionality has been implemented (user registration and authentication, ads listing and filtering, etc). However, a cursory testing shows that the system is vulnerable to common malicious exploits (CSRF, XSS, local file inclusion).
After examining the code, I realized they didn’t implement data validation procedures on the server side (they merely use a regex for validating a mail address and mysqli_real_escape_string() to sanitize strings against SQL injections). They implemented some validation routines but on the client side, with JavaScript. Obviously, that’s part of the UI and doesn’t offer any kind of security against malicious users.
They argue that since three developers are insufficient for developing a full webapp from scratch (I agree), they’re going to implement features first and then securing them properly, in order to meet certain deadlines. I’m not an experienced programmer by any measure, but I believe is going to take longer to implement security a posteriori. Moreover, if they manage to do it somehow, it’s going to be subpar compared to data sanitization routines implemented from the beginning.
So, my questions are: (i) it is reasonable to implement security (ie, implement at least proper sanitization routines) after implementing features? (ii) If the answer for (i) is “no”, what bibliography, security frameworks (but I guess they’re embedded in web frameworks as such), etc. would you recommend for managing projects where security was poorly handled?
No it's not acceptable to implement security after the project is done for multiple reasons. First, as has already been mentioned, whoever is footing this bill is unlikely to continue paying to implement the security features when they already have the product they want. The second reason is because it will take them much longer to go through and try to find the all the security vulnerabilities than it would be to code it correctly the first time and implement any security measures as you're writing that code. Doing it this way would also be easier to do because you can write security libraries which will do things like escape data for you so that it just becomes fluid to write the code by doing a simple call to the escape function/method. The third reason is because there is absolutely no way that they will be able to find all of the vulnerabilities by looking back through the code. It's hard enough (see near impossible) to write the code without security bugs, let alone to go back through it and find all of those security vulnerabilities.
As for a suggested framework, I really don't have one as I never used frameworks either, only the libraries I've written in the past to use. This however comes down to just finding good developers and not ones who say they can get it done for a super low price. The PHP developer pool is filled with these half-assed developers, and I'd say a fair number of them prefer pre-made frameworks. The trick is to just find some good ones from the start. The only option you really have for securing an application written poorly like this is to get a WAF (web application firewall) and have it filter any malicious content being sent to the server. This isn't a silver bullet though for poorly written code. I wouldn't even call it a band-aid, more of a hail-mary.
One final thing is that I very much disagree that they are understaffed with 3 people writing this. I wrote something similar 4 years ago by myself (well ok there was an html guy) in under 3 months. Two of those 3 months were completely rewriting sections because the client would change his mind once it was complete plus writing in side features that turned it into more of a social network than a classified site. If I could do most of that myself in that amount of time, they should easily be able to get it done (and secure) in a month and a half with 3 people.
It's really not reasonable to implement security later.
It may not take any longer or be sub par, it might be faster and better. The problem is that it to probably won't be done at all as the project will be late and over budget.
I'm surprised at th decision to not use a framework, that looks like a 1 person-week job using Rails, Symfony or Django and the security would have been baked in.
Security should be taken into account all the time in development phases, if it is over seen/neglected then improvements to the API in development should be constructed on the first availabe instance.
The last thing you want to do is release a script to the public with many security/malicious holes within the code structure its' self.
So I would recommend informing these developers to take a look over their work and make appropriate changes to the already made API to increase security.
The project might be finished late and over budget if the security aspect is overlooked and not modified.. It's best to approach this head on before it's too late (when you've released to the public traffic and face longer down time than expected)
overall point.. Nail it in the butt before it becomes a serious problem.
It's not unreasonable to deal with security matters at the later stage of development, as long as it's merely an issue of implementation and not a fundamental deficiency in design. There is no such thing as "more secured" or "less secured." Either a system is secured or it's not. One has to consider the behavior of an application as a whole. As such, it's not all that profitable to handle security while the codebase is still in flux. While it's fashionable to say that security should be integral to the entire development process, in a world where resources are finite, such an approach is more academic than practical. Having sufficient time for quality assurance prior to delivery will in all likelihood yield better returns.
just to add what everyone else suggested, you must embrace security from day one.
not doing this will only be prone to errors and bugs in the code.
have a look at the Microsoft Secure Development Lifecycle:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/sdl/default.aspx
Also, I would recommend you to review the code / pentest it to identify any potential issues.
Thanks
Fabio
#fcerullo
Disclaimer: Similar questions has been asked a number of times on SO, however this question is much more specific, and has not been adequately addressed so far.
We're developing a new packaged software, which, for business security reasons, must run on our customer's server, in PHP. The software is sold with a per-user end-license; price range is within $20-80 per user, target market is small (and web-savy) consultancies, and IT agencies.
To discourage piracy (eg. removing the user-license enforcement), we'd like to maximize the protection of the PHP code in any means technologically available, which does not inconvenience the user.
Let's break this down:
does not inconvenience the user: no additional server-side installs (no zend decoder, or other binaries). Has to run on a plain-vanilla shared PHP host out-of-the-box.
Maximize the protection: breaking the protection has to outweigh the cost of buying an additional license. That is, it has to take at least 3-5 working days for a professional hacker to remove the user license protection.
Any means technologically available: might call home, might use high-end crypto, might implement a c64 emulator.
To pro-actively address the so far highest-voted non-solutions:
NOT looking for perfect obfuscation, just extremely hard ones (defined as: have to take at least 3-5 working days to decrypt), OR other anti-piracy methods
NOT looking for "black-box" software packages, which I don't know how they work, and can't determine whether it fits our purpose; looking for algorithmic ,and out-of-the-box ideas.
NOT looking for license/law-side protection, we already have that covered.
We DO know, that given enough time, and focus, all obfuscation will be hacked sooner or later; we merely want this not to be the economical solution.
Given the above constraints, what methods, or ideas would you use to maximize anti-piracy measures?
Bounty-hunt: point goes for the hardest algorithmic method to reverse-engineer the code, given the constraints above.
Update / Bounty-hunt: I've accepted Ira Baxter's answer, mostly because the rest failed to answer the core question, and attempted to question the underlying assumptions (business, closed source, yadda yadda). Thanks all!
I think what you want to do is to transform the code algorithmically, to obfuscate not only what is executed, but also to obfuscate the data structures. We assume we start with a clean version of the program, produced by the developer. He always works wih the clean version. Obfuscation produces the to-ship version. Good obfuscation will produce a to-ship version with exactly the same functionality as the original, so no further testing is (arguably) needed.
For control flow scrambling, the idea is to take the nicely written code you have at the start, and push it through transformations that make static (and human) analysis of the decisions that control the flow difficult by multiplying the set of assumptions that have to analyzed. For instance, if you have two pointers, and store a value through one, can it affect the value seen by the other? Depending on whether the pointers are aliased on not, you can get two different answers. Now take N pointers, each of which may be aliased; you get 2^N possible aliasing relations. If the reader doesn't know the exact combination, he won't be able to determine if a decision might be true, false or conditional. Of course, the tool that generates this produces conditionals whose outcome it knows, because it designs (generates) the pointer rat's nest to produce a specific outcome.
See Code Obfuscation Literature Survey (not my paper), which discusses a variety of control flow and data flow obfuscation. This is likely not the most recent summary of what is possible, but its pretty instructive. You should note doing this kind of obfuscation has some impact on execution time.
What the papers on this topic make clear is that control and data flow obfuscated programs are extremely hard for static analyzers to "understand"; the papers provide/reference demonstrations of the algorithmic complexity of processing such obfuscated programs.
Now, you might argue that people aren't static analyzers and therefore don't suffer the same limitations. You might be right; Roger Penrose famously argues that people do not have the same constraints as Turing machines; the argument isn't settled by a long shot. But the entire foundation of encryption/hashing technology is built on essentially the same kind of computational complexity arguments. And to date, nobody has proven smart enough to crack these technologies in ways
that can be used in daily life by theives (good thing, or your bank accounts would be empty).
To do this to a PHP program, you need tools that can parse the PHP code, and carry out such transformations. Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit has robust PHP parsers, and can apply very complex transformations to code. To do this really well, you want to apply the transformations globally across all your code, not just on a file-by-file basis. We don't have this kind of obfuscation transformation implemented on PHP, but if you really wanted to do it, this would be the way. We have applied complex transformations to PHP programs for other commercial products that we sell.
When you are all done, ideally you'd compile this result to machine code, say using the HipHop compiler. (Just compiling would defeat some folks, but not the serious software engineers).
EDIT: Obfuscation != AntiPiracy is a theme in other answers. So how does obfuscation help?
First you need to deal with the anti-piracy issue. The obvious things to do are:
Add copyright comments to each file. These serve as warnings to theives. Not good ones.
Add copyright strings in various places and print them out occasionally;
these will end up in memory and play a roleif a pirate steals the code; he stole this string, too.
Add a string to your application saying, "licensed to ". This makes
your customer unenthusiastic about letting it be stolen.
Add a check to your application that it is running on the intended customer's machine.
(Since your app is intended to be very cheap, you'll probably need to automate
a registration process)
Have the application phone home with its machine ID occasionally.
Now, these steps prevent someone (legally and technically) from stealing your code.
If this is all you have, an unfazed pirate will simply remove the technical checks and its stolen.
It is very hard to prevent somebody from copying the bit stream that makes up
your product; computers are far too good at copying.
So your goal is to arrange for it to be hard for him to derive
value if he does, and that's where obfuscation comes in.
If the code is sufficiently obfuscated, he will have a difficult time locating the license check
and phone home mechansisms to disable them. (I suggest several checks, none of them always called, to make it hard for the theif to tell when he is successful.).
The obfuscation, well done, should protect the printing of the original
owner's name, which means the original owner will have some interest in prevent it from being
stolen as you'll name him along with pirate in any lawsuit.
If they defeat the licenses, copyright printing, and phone-home mechanisms,
and simply want to run it in the back room without telling you, you might be stuck.
(For $80.00, I can't imagine why they'd go to all this trouble just for this effect).
But many thieves want to modify the software to "improve" it, especially if they want your market. Serious obfuscation will prevent them for doing this; it will even
make it hard for them to add thier own license controls.
That limits the value pretty severely.
They may simply steal it and release it to world for free; your hope here is
the applicaton is hard to crack. If they succeed, your only good defense
is a continuing stream of upgrades that licensed owners get.
Obfuscation is a key to successful piracy defense, IMHO.
Obfuscation != Anti-piracy For instance you could have a heavily obfuscated class, but I can use reflection to see all methods that this class implements. I can then extend this class and override any methods that I don't like. Are you storing a secret? Because any secret value can be pulled from memory using a debugger.
3-5 days? Even with Zend-Guard it takes 3-5 seconds to break using some open source tool. Most obfuscation tools are very primitive and easy to break.
I'm sorry but I don't think there is a good solution for this.
The best anti piracy method is no method.
If you don't want to use tools such as zend, then you are better off doing absolutely nothing.
Take it from me you can waste more time and lose sales trying to stop pirates. you will only hurt yourself. Hey they don't care and its good fun, the harder you make it the more satisfaction they get in doing it. and once its done it will be available for all via a torrent. so no-one needs to repeat the effort.
Make a good application. make it work well. give Fantastic service and the customers you want will gladly pay. those customers you don't want will NEVER pay so don't waste time on them. And guess what, they actually become good advertising. people see your software on more sites they come looking for it.
So in effect you are getting free advertising.
So don't stress, don't waste your time and don't blame pirates if your software fails. blame yourself because you got too distracted trying to do the impossible
I wanted to add a little bit of my personal experience.
Back in the 90's I spent many months creating encryption techniques to reduce/prevent pirating of a heavily pirated piece of software, in the end I 'mostly' succeeded.
I used custom encryption, junk insertion, random number generators, cross module CRC checking, blah blah blah.
I used to hang out in the news group devoted to hacking my software and others like it and even struck up conversations. one polite fellow said "why are you wasting your time we do this for fun". but I was hooked. it was a competition.
If I had spent the time and effort on improving the software instead, I would have earned 10x the amount I thought I had lost to piracy.
It was a fools victory.
I thought about this a lot, and what you are asking is essentially impossible. You can obfuscate to no end and people will still steal your software. There is little you can do about it. If you write in code to call home, someone will strip it out and just put true in instead. Your best bet is to write quality software so people want to buy it. It's either that or use a commercial solution like ionCube or Zend.
Only a few things can really work. The most basic logic I can think of that would be effective (since this market sounds like it's fairly controlled, and finite) would be to use something similar to a licensing server, but with a two-way communication channel (that you can encrypt etc.. etc..).
Now, of course you can have someone disable that communication channel, but between the coding you will add to disable the software, and the fact that your company will be able to follow up with the client since you will know exactly who it is that is "down" that will help.
The third part of the logic, is for each license that is given out to play a role in generating the "checks" that will occur between the software and your licensing server. This means you generate, on-premise, unique hash codes that are used as part of the answer your software send back to the server. That pretty much rules out the hacking, because the hacker would have to know what algorith you are using to generate the licensing (since it is pre-generated, there is no logic to use to decipher it) and the hacker would have to feed you a licensing key.
The fourth step, optionally, would be to push updates to clients to refresh the security mechanisms you have in place and run "tamper" checks on your code, possibly periodically feed some sort of hash to be used in the logic your software uses to connect to the licensing server.
This still isn't perfect, someone "will" be able to clone a production machine, circumvent/redirect the licensing (and you won't know since it will be a copy) and try to work away at the check that you have in your code which require a license (as someone above mentioned, set all the logic to "True")... but you could definitly spend the time putting checks and encryption on your licensing system and make it a time-consuming and "risky" process. Unlesss.. as a final touch... you can have some deliverable from your product generated by your server (none of the code is in what the client has) and pushed to the software that has this licensing mechanism in place.. but i don't know how possible that is.
Artificial code bloat
By using post processors to automatically bloat the code and insert logic multipliers you make the code hard to modify
I use tags in the original source to indicate the type of code in each method and which code multiplier to use. Randomisers can help too, as each release looks very different
The code bloat is achieved by a variety of processes. e.g. repeating and random fiddling of variables before and after they are officially in scope. Lots of extra logic steps that will never get followed. Breaking single statements into many random small steps. Interlace these with as many other statements as possible as long as the final step is in the correct order. etc etc
The final and most important part of this process is to interlace key generation and call home processes through this mess, and to be part of this mess (remember the "random fiddling of variables before and after they are officially in scope") so that the time taken to remove the key generation and call home become unwieldy
The call home server has to act like a rolling code remote control so while the attacker might discover the call home functions, taking them out will result in incorrect initialisation values for general variables in general methods, and in as many cases as you can work with
Over time you can build the general purpose code re-parser, and a library of functions to mess the code up. Keep adding the code mess library to improve the obfuscation level
You need to have a well covering unit and integration test library to validate the code after being messed up
I have not done this with PHP, but with other languages with similar constraints as PHP
Note: This technique works fine for complex scientific software where there is large amounts of cryptic logic and maths anyway. It may not work so well for typical web sites like CMS's unless your code multipliers are very convincing
If I get this right, why not invest in a server to be delivered within the cost of the application, a server which can be placed at the customer, with only one port opened for http access, I mean with a $1000 you can get a machine that can work as a safe for your software. If anyone attempts to hack into it you will know.
Another solution might be:
Currently I am working for a huge company that has aprox 350 selling points(shops) all over the country. As we can not rely on internet connection 100% we have a server at each shop. This server handles the business required for actual selling and it is linked to a local database. The rest of the stuff sits at the head-office server. Now, the clerks have computers in front of them, and all these computers work with the application hosted on the local server, the catch on the local server is that a registry which knows if a certain service is placed locally (on the same machine) or remote (at the head office) and executes the call as required (over http from remote location or direct call from local service). Services can be placed anywhere (local or remote) and all one needs to do is to configure their location in the registry by simply entering one of the keywords : local,remote,application (application keyword means that the service is first called from remote and if it fails it is called locally). This way you can make an acceptable compromise. Highly necessary stuff can sit locally and the rest of the business logic can reside on your server where nobody can touch it.
The short answer is no, there is no way to obfuscate code in such a complex manner that it takes days to crack. The simple explanation: obfuscation is a two way process. It can be done and undone. If a computer can do it, a determined person can do it too.
Instead of wasting so much time on protecting your code, why not take the hint from the popular TV show 24 (side note: Should have never been canceled!). To ensure scripts weren't stolen or revealed to the public, they watermarked each with a number specific to cast member, director, producer, etc. You can do something similar with you scripts by "watermarking" each PHP file. This can be something as simple as changing the name of the variable to reflect a client ID or something as complex as spreading identifying characters over multiple variable and function values/names. Try working this identifier and/or parts of it into as many inconspicuous places in your scripts as possible. Only you can know the exact combination that creates the identifying information. This way if code is leaked you can sue the responsible party.
Just a suggestion, you might just want to add needed lines of code that don't really do anything, except it looks like it.
Possible reasons:
1) so the user can't figure out the code and "issue himself more licenses" or other stuff that is commercially sensitive to you
2) so the user can't "just make a tiny change" and break what he doesn't understand, then tell you he didn't change anything and expect you to fix it (sure, you can make him pay, but it's easier to avoid the hassle in the first place)
3) so the customer can't take some of your software and use it do develop new products
4) you are embarrassed to let your uncommented spaghetti code be seen ;-)
5) any more?
What do you generally do? And how do you do it?
If hosting the php code on your servers is not an option, the best thing is to simply deliver the source code with a restrictive license and accept the risks you outlined above. If the user "issues more licenses" and it violates your terms, you can pursue legal actions.
On the receiving end, I have purchased PHP software that was ofsucated/encoded with ionCube PHP Encoder (http://www.ioncube.com/). It required adding an additional server component and including effectively closed-source code no our servers, neither of which our IT team was happy about. But it prevented us from fiddling with the source as you are attempting.
I deliver it as is. End-users expect to be able to edit the code whether it's free or commercial. Most of them aren't pirates, so getting in their way will just hurt your business (less happy customers = less positive mentions and referrals). The pirates will steal your software whether you obfuscate/encode it or not, anyway.
If a client breaks my code and try to pin it on me I offer to restore the code to the last known working configuration. This usually ends the conversation because they know it was a modification they made.
Seems like an unnecessary precaution to me. Even if you obfuscate it it can still be redistributed. As a developer, piracy is a known risk and the best way to avoid it is to release software that is open source. :)
I would seriously think twice about doing business with a developer in the future if I purchased a script that was obfuscated (making it difficult for me to make changes). I mean.. what PHP script needs ZERO modification to get it to do exactly what you want it to?
Concerning point #2:
You can always generate a hash of your deliverables. Very simple method: generate an md5 hash using the source files as input. If you suspect tampering when receiving a support call, simply hash the deployed files to figure out if your client has tampered with the code and tries to get you to fix their mess.
This is non-intrusive (you just hash before you deliver, and keep the hashes in your files) and a quite safe way to check the contents of your files.
No one has addressed that delivering the licensing source allows customers to switch it off and have unlimited licences. That is my main concern
I'm looking for an automated way to fuzz my app or scan it for vulnerabilities. Please assume that my hacking knowledge is 0. Also the source is on my localhost so I need a way to fuzz it locally without relying on an internet connection. Can some security experts give me some hints or recommendations? I'm not sure what options are best.
Edit:
Thanks for the effort to answer, but none so far seems to get the point. I'd like to be more specific (because it helps the question) but without influencing opinions or sounding like I'm advertising a specific product. I'm looking for something like wapiti (sorry to mention names, but had to, because answers so far like learn about sql injections, xss etc. are obviously not real "expert" answers to this question. I already know about these (seriously, does this question sound like it could asked by someone who doesn't know salt about security?)
I'm not asking whether I should test, I'm asking how I should test. I already decided to incorporate automation (and there's no turning back in this decision unless someone gives me an expert answer that proves it useless), so please respect my decision that I'd like to automate. I don't want to go through every compiled xss, sql injection, etc. hack list and try it manually myself against my site (even hackers don't hack that way). Super extra points to anyone who gets the question.
Some people are asking why not just learn.
Best practices (which I know) are not the same as knowing hacking. Some people want to argue they're a flip-coin, but I definitely don't agree :) hence I need a protection tool by someone with the "hacker mentality". How is that going to hurt, in fact, you should try it too ;) Expert answers please from those who know.
There are services that will do automated scans for vulnerabilities. They will not catch everything, but will help you identify problems. Your best bet is to use one of these services and LEARN SOME SECURITY best practices.
Start learning about sql injection and cross site scripting. these are the biggest and easiest to fix vulnerabilities.
Programming defensively is a skill that IMHO every programmer should learn.
There is no substitute for understanding these issues on your own.
To strictly answer your question the way you should test is by using a tool. There are 2 main types of tools you can use, a security scanner which actively probes a running website or a static analysis tool which runs on the source code you use to build your webapp.
The short answer is you want a security scanning tool like wapiti or burp. Tools like these dynamically construct and execute security tests uniquely for your site. You could manually attempt to exploit your own site but that would take lots of time and not provide any value. It would be useless for you to go through a list of known xss or sql injection issues because each issue is unique to the site it applies to. Furthermore these tools can attack your site better then you can giving you a more rigorous security stress test.
There are 2 main tools you can use, static analysis tools and dynamic analysis tools. Static analysis tools read in your source code, figure out the way the data flows through the app and look for security issues. At their root most security issues are allowing a user to control some data that flows into an inappropriate part of an application so even though the app isn't running and you rub up against the halting problem, static analysis method of "guessing" and trying out each code path can yield good results. Static analysis tools are language dependent and most are expensive. Some free ones are fxcop (C#), PMD and findbugs (java), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis
Dynamic analysis tools (more commonly just called "security scanner") require you setup your webapp so it can run tests against it, this sounds like more what you want. My favorite tool here is burp, some free ones include wapiti which is good as well. These tools will look at how your app handles data, look for inputs and fill them with malicious data in an attempt to trigger vulnerabilities. An example test would be for testing reflected cross-site scripting, the scanner would look at a page and insert javascript into every querystring value, cookie value, form value etc and then render the page to see if the malicious javascript was echod back to the page.
You likely don't need or want a fuzzer. Fuzzing tools mostly help you when there is a lot of parsing code so a fuzzer is not the best fit for a webapp whereas it would be a good fit for a protocol you are making. There is limited fuzzing capabilities in the security scanner tools listed above and you probably don't need more then this. Fuzzers also take time to build. Fuzzers often find more stuff in c/c++ code because there are less libraries built in already doing the right thing, in the webapp case there is less "room for fuzzers to play" so to speak.
Before you go crazy on automation (which will likely yield results you probably won't understand), I'd suggest that you read up of writing secure code instead and learn to identify the things you are doing wrong. Here are some tutorials to get you started:
http://php.net/manual/en/security.php
Failing that, I'd suggest outsourcing your code to a security firm if you can afford it.
Good luck!
Provided you know C, You can work with spike, Its always good to do a manual check for overflows in anything that could conceivably be touched by an end-user, The usual %x%x%x tests for format string attacks, and just to be diligent in your static analysis.
PeachFuzz and SPIKE are both well documented.
Failing that, writing your own is trivial.
Knowing what fuzzing is and how you may want to approach does not necessarily lead to the skills necessary to thoroughly test and evaluate your software for vulnerabilities and flaws. You need to use automated testing, but in a tuned manner where you modify the testing that the tool is doing as you find new input paths, interactions, and so on.
Basically, what I'm saying is that you need to know what you are doing if you want this to be a real value add. You cannot just pick a tool, run it, and expect to get good results. You need someone who does this type of testing to work either with or for you. Tools are useful, but can only produce useful results when used by someone skilled in this art.
I've used Paros - http://www.parosproxy.org/ - its free, easy to use and displays both the cause of the error, the possible fix and how to replicate it (usually a link).
It easy to configure and spiders your entire site - it can also spider local installations.
It has a gui as well.
Its old, but its good and easy.
I tried to configure WAPITI but it was simply too hard for me.
I've been researching this topic for many years for my own application and found a fantastic tool recently which was based on PAROS (see my other answer above)
Its ZAP from OWASP and is the ducks nuts.
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Zed_Attack_Proxy_Project
One of the best things you can do is integrate ZAP into your project automation / build so whenever you do a build the test runs.
Even better, you can sit it next to your selenium automated tests to 'collect' the pages you test, then......scan the hell out of them!
Its really well documented, but you'll need a fast PC as it runs hundreds of tests per page. If you're doing a whole site it can take some time.
There are some other tools you might want to consider
http://sqlmap.org/
I found this tool....scarily easy to use and very very comprehensive.
Whenever I got what I thought was a 'false positive' with ZAP, I'd scan the page with SQLmap (you gotta figure out how to use Python - its easy, took a couple of hours) and SQLmap would either verify the false positive or find the vulnerability.
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Do you have a strategy for this? If I sell a web-system to a client and in accordance with the legal agreement, the customer is not allowed to sell it to others, how can I be sure he doesn't do that anyway?
My first idea is some sort of key that must be in the root directory, and that file is only valid for that specific domain.
Other Ideas?
UPDATE 1
I agree that this is mainly a legal problem. But the facts are: I´ve got a client that buys this system from me to sell it to others. And he wants this system to function so it's easy for him to make his profit. The ability to package the web server and sell it is part of the specification.
UPDATE 2
Another one point of view is this. In that case it is hard to prove how much of the reselled software comes from my original system.
UPDATE 3
Obfuscating is not an option for me, a really hate it.
Some use an obfuscator like Zend Guard but honestly I think that technical solutions for this kind of problem are as doomed as DRM is for audio and video content. Fundamentally what you've giving them is meant to work so it's just a technical problem to make it work in ways you don't want.
Your recourses here are (imho) legal not technical. You have a contract with the client that lays out what they can and can't do. You have a good lawyer draft that contract. If they don't abide by it then you pretty much have to take them to court.
Don't count on any form of obfuscation or copy protection as any kind of guarantee.
This is particularly a problem for scripting languages because (Zend notwithstanding), they are fundamentallly plaintext distribution methods. Java and .Net and other bytecode compiled languages have a little more protection but they can be disassembled into intermediate code too (but obfuscation is more useful here). Truly compiled languages (eg c, C++) have the most protection of all since disassembling a 50 meg binary into assembler code typically isn't that useful.
Even then there are no guarantees. If you're not comfortable with that then you need to carefully select your clients, live with the potential breach of contract (and the possible enforcement that might compel you to pursue) or find another line of work.
I reckon the only way to be sure is to offer your product as a hosted solution so the client never has access to the code. If you build it with this goal in mind you can still have resellers and let them skin the system so it looks like their own product.
This works well where I work, in theory customers can licence the code to run on their own infrastructure, but it is priced at such a level that only big companies are prepared to pay, and big companies are on the whole more concerned with legal niceties so are less likely to just run off with your work.
People are very prepared happy to go with hosted solutions if the price is right, and it can have benefits for everyone. The customer doesn't have to worry about getting everything set up and they also have the security of knowing that if something does need tweaking we (the developers) are there to do it.
This is a social problem, not a technical one. You have copyright law on your side; no more should be needed. (Any and all technical solutions would be the equivalent of DRM, which is inherently ineffective.)
Regarding your update: So basically you become a DRM supplier for this client of yours.
So: Does the client understand that DRM is ineffective? Try educating them before wasting time on implementation.
If the client remains adamant, I'd take a long hard look at what current DRM vendors are doing. E.g. lots of handwaving, some obfuscation, and, erm... I don't know... what else do they do? Either way, you can be certain that any solution you implement will be undone in less than 10% of the time it took you to implement it - so spend as short an amount of time on this as you can get away with. (Before it was edited out, you wrote "It's in the spec" about "being sure that the system isn't sold on": this might mean you've agreed to build something which is technically impossible (you can never be sure), and would require you spending an infinite amount of time building something which comes close...)
You might investigate having the application contact some central registry when run for the first time (with embedded fingerprint, different for each sale, so you know who passed on their code). That way your client can find out where the application is being run, and has a chance of contacting those who use it without permission. (Potentially turning them into new paying customers.) Maybe give said central repository the ability to send a kill-signal back? That gets really scary though, and liability concerns would be huge; avoid if at all possible.
Obfuscating the source is more trouble than it is worth, in my experience, unless you are trying to keep some complicated algorithm secret.
I would suggest doing the following:
Make sure you and your client and your lawyers all understand and agree with your contract.
Insert a short copyright statement as a comment in every source file.
Insert copyright notices into the generated web pages (via page templates or php code) as HTML comments, so a 'view source' will prove that your code is being in an unlicensed application.
If you're really worried, and this isn't an intranet-only app, you might expand on (3) and insert unique hidden text into the pages that is seen by Google but not by users.
None of this will stop a determined thief, but will help deter and detect "accidental" thefts.
The proper way of prohibiting re-sale of your software is via legal constraints, not technical ones. Have your customer sign a contract where they agree not to re-sell.
Technical prevention measures universally make the product worse, also in the technical sense, and that lessens the value to the customers. The stronger the technical protection is, the bigger the nuisance.
For example, suppose the customer legitimately wants to change their domain name. Should they have to buy a new copy? I think not. If you tell them how to change the keyfile to match their new domain, they can then use that information to enable them to re-sell. However, the legal protection applies regardless of what technical tricks they come up with.
But a problem is when you aren't afraid of the customer reselling what you have done, out of the box, which can be tracked by lawyers. The problem can be that the customer is refactoring it. I mean take my many hours of work and change a couple of things and call it his... Sell it for a small amount cheaper and win the business...
That is why I am looking at technical solutions for protecting my work. It will also possibly help me to keep the invoicing fromo lawyers to a minimum, which is a substantial amount of change from having him/her to protect my work.
How can I be sure he doesn´t do that anyway?
You can't prevent it...period. If anyone has the source there is no way to stop them...you can only then resort to punishing them if they do.
Perhaps your contract, besides forbidding them from reselling it, has a price associated with them reselling it, i.e. something like 10x or 20x what you would normally pay, plus legal expenses if any required to get them to payup...that way, if they choose to do it anyway, you have a nice piece of paper, with their signature on it that already has a nice fat pre-agreed upon price that they need to pay should they go ahead and sell it.
I haven't seen mention of Ioncube and so was wondering if there is a reason for not using it?
Yes it costs money to set up and yes it requires a server side library to be installed (I daresay most hosts these days have it already running) but it does allow for domain restrictions as well as time based restrictions.
Maybe you could even use it in conjunction with PHPAudit?