Alternative of html purifier - php

I want to accept to accept the html input from user and post it on my site also want to make sure that it don't create problem with my site template due to dirty html code.
I was using html purifier in the past but Html purifier is not working on one of my server. So I am searching for best alternative.
Which is purely written in php.
which can fix the dirty html code like
</div> it is dirty code as div is closed without opening.

Simple solution without third-party libraries: create a DOMDocument and call loadHTML on it with your input. Surrounded the input with <html> and <body> tags if you are only parsing a little snippet. You'll probably want to suppress warnings too, as you'll get them spat out for common bad HTML.
Then simply walk over the resulting document tree, removing any elements and attributes you've not included in a known-good list. You should also check allowed URL attributes to ensure they use known-good schemes like http:, and not potentially troublesome schemes like javascript:. If you want to go the extra mile you can check that only allowed combinations of elements are nested inside each other (this is easier the smaller number of elements you're allowing).
Finally, serialise the snippet's node again using saveHTML. Because you're creating new markup from a DOM, not maintaining the original—potentially malformed—markup, that's a whole class of odd-markup injection techniques you're blocking.

You can try PHP Tidy, which is the Tidy library in PHP.

I believe Tidy will help close your tags, but it isn't as comprehensive as HTML Purifier which can remove valid but unwanted tags or attributes (i.e. JavaScript onclick events, that kind of thing).
Be aware that Tidy requires libtidy to be installed on your server, so it's not just straight PHP.
I know Pádraic Brady has been working on an alternative to HTML Purifier for Zend Framework, though I think its just experimental code at this time
http://framework.zend.com/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=25002168
http://github.com/padraic/wibble

Do also consider HTMLawed at https://www.bioinformatics.org/phplabware/internal_utilities/htmLawed/
From that page;
use to filter, secure & sanitize HTML in blog comments or forum posts, generate XML-
compatible feed items from web-page excerpts, convert HTML to XHTML, pretty-print
HTML, scrape web-pages, reduce spam, remove XSS code, etc.
Note that Tidy/HTML Tiday is NOT a anti XSS solution. It is a clean and repair utility which allows you to clean HTML, XHTML, and XML markup.
HTMLawed is a 55kb single php file whilst HTML Purifer is a 3 MB folder.

Related

PHP HTML Purifier and MathML

Is there any simple way to allow all MathML tags with attributes in HTML Purifier?
I tried to put all the MathML tags from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/MathML/Element/semantics with attributes to HTML.Allowed but I don't know if this is the right way.
There's currently no native support for MathML in HTML Purifier. There's an old pull request you could potentially repurpose here, but as it's a few years old patching it in will almost surely require significant manual effort; see also some discussion here:
The primary consideration is security. When adding a very big new
extension like MathML, it is very tempting to cut corners, and not
truly understand every corner of the specification and build a parser
that truly understands what it reads, and isn't just checking
syntax blindly.
Alternatively you could use the customization guide to add them as new tags and attributes to HTML Purifier, but that's more work, not less.
Simply adding the tags to HTML.Allowed won't do much - HTML Purifier's strength is that it understands the context that tags appear in, where they're allowed to appear and what restrictions make sense on their attributes (e.g. an attribute like 'width' takes integers, but an attribute like 'style' takes CSS (that will be sanitised separately), and an attribute like 'onclick' is unsafe by definition). If HTML Purifier doesn't know anything about a particular tag, it won't allow it, even if you add it to the allowlist, because it won't know how to actually handle the tag.
In short:
No, there is unfortunately no simple way to allow MathML in HTML Purifier.

Use WYSIWYG Editor with PHP escape Method

I am building a small/test CMS using Php and Mysql.
Everything is working amazingly on the adding, editing, deleting and displaying level, but after finishing my code, I wanted to add a WYSIWYG editor in the Admin back end.
My problem is that I am using escape method to hopefully make my form a bit more secure and try to escape injections, therefore when adding a styled text, image or any other HTML code in my Editor I am getting them printed as line codes on my page(Which is completely right to avoid attacks).
MY ESCAPE METHOD:
function e($text) {
return htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');}
Is there any way to work around my escape method (which is think it should not be done because if I can do it every attacker could).
Or should I change my escape method to another method?
If I understand you correctly you are going to allow your users to put some formatting into the text they are going to create. For this you are going to add some WYSISWYG editor. But the question is how to distinguish the formatting and special characters which are allowed from what is not allowed. You need to clean up the text and leave only valid allowed formatting (HTML tags) and remove all malicious JavaScript or HTML.
This is not an easy task like it might sound at the first moment. I can see several approaches here.
Easiest solution to use strip_tags and specify what tags are allowed.
But please keep in mind that strip_tags is not perfect. Let me quote the manual here.
Because strip_tags() does not actually validate the HTML, partial or
broken tags can result in the removal of more text/data than expected.
This function does not modify any attributes on the tags that you
allow using allowable_tags, including the style and onmouseover
attributes that a mischievous user may abuse when posting text that
will be shown to other users.
This is a known issue. And libraries exist which do a better cleanup of HTML and JS to prevent breaks.
A bit more complicated solution would be to use some advanced library to cleanup the HTML code. For example this might be HTML Purifier
Quote from the documentation
HTML Purifier will not only remove all malicious code (better known as
XSS) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist, it
will also make sure your documents are standards compliant, something
only achievable with a comprehensive knowledge of W3C's
specifications.
The other libraries exist which solve the same task. You can check for example this article where libraries are compared. And finally you might choose the best one.
Completely different approach is to avoid users from writing HTML tags. Ask them to write some other markup instead like this is done on StackOverflow or Basecamp or GitHub. Markdown might be a good approach.
Using simple markup for text allows you to complete avoid issues with broken HTML and JavaScript cause you can escape everything and build HTML markup on your own.
The editor might look like the one I'm using to write this message :)
You can use strip_tags() to remove the unwanted tags. Read about it on this manual:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php
Example 1 (Based on the manual)
<?php
$text = '<p>Test paragraph, With link.</p>';
# Output: Test paragraph, With link. (Tags are stripped)
echo strip_tags($text);
echo "\n";
# Allow <p> and <a>
#Output: <p>Test paragraph, With link.</p>
echo strip_tags($text, '<p><a>');
?>
I hope this will help you!

Sanitize HTML5 with PHP (prevent XSS)

I'm building WYSIWYG editor with HTML5 and Javascript.
I'll allow users post pure HTML via WYSIWYG, so it have to be sanitized.
Basic task like protecting site from cross site scripting (XSS) is coming difficult task, because there isn't up-to-date purify & filter -software for PHP.
HTML Purifier isn't support HTML5 at the moment and overall status looks very bad (HTML5 support isn't coming anytime soon).
So how should I sanitize untrusted HTML5 with PHP (backend) ?
Options so far...
HTML Purifier (lack of new HTML5 tags, data-attributes etc.)
Implementing own purifier with strip_tags() and Tidy or PHP's DOM classes/functions
Using some "random" Tidy implementations like http://eksith.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/whitelist-html-sanitizing-with-php/
Google Caja (Javascript / Cloud)
htmLawed (there's beta for HTML5 support)
Is there any other options out there? Is PHP dying? ;)
PHP offers parsing methods to protect from code PHP/SQL injections (i.e. mysql_real_escape_string()). This is not the case for HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Why that?
First: HTML/CSS/Javascript sole purpose is to display information. It is pretty much up to you to accept certain elements of HTML or reject them depending of your requirements.
Secondly: due to the very high number of HTML/CSS/JS elements (also increasing constantly), it is impossible to try to control HTML. you cannot expect a functional solution.
This is why I would suggest a top-down solution. I suggest to start restricting everything and then only allowing a certain number of tags. One good base is probably to use BBCdode, pretty popular. If you want to "unlock" additional specific tags beyond BBCode, you can always add some.
This is the reason BBCode-like scripts are popular on forums and websites (including stack overflow). WISIGIG editors are designed for admin/internal use, because you don't expect your website administrator to inject bad content.
bottom-top approaches are vowed to fail. HTML sanitizers are exposed to exponential complexity and do not guarantee anything.
EDIT 1
You say it is a sanitation problem, not a front end issue. I disagree, because as you cannot handle all present and future HTML entities you would better restrict it at a front end level to be 100% sure.
This said, perhaps the below is a working solution for you:
you can do a bit to sanitize your code by striping all entities
except those in a white list using PHP's strip_tags().
You can also remove all remaining tags attributes (properties)
by using PHP's preg_replace() with some regular expression.
$string = "put some very dirty HTML here.";
$string = strip_tags($string, '<p><a><span><h1><li><ul><br>');
$string = preg_replace("/<([b-z][b-z0-9]*)[^>]*?(\/?)>/i",'<$1$2>', $string);
echo $string;
This will return your sanitized text.
note : I have excluded attributes removal for tags because you may still want to keep href="" properties. hence the [b-z][B-Z] regex.
I Believe the ideal is to use a combination :
mysql_real_escape_string(addslashes($_REQUEST['data']));
On Write
and
stripslashes($data)
on read always did the trick for me, I think it is better than
htmentities($data) on write
and
html_entity_decode($data) on read

White list of HTML tags I should allow from user generated content?

All,
I am building a small site using PHP. In the site, I receive user-generated text content. I want to allow some safe HTML tag (e.g., formatting) as well as MathML. How do I go about compiling a white list for a strip_tags() function? Is there a well accepted white list I can use?
The standard strip_tags function is not enough for security, since it doesn't validate attributes at all. Use a more complete library explicitly for the purpose of completely sanitizing HTML like HTML Purifier.
If your aim is to not allow javascript through, then your whitelist of tags is going to be pretty close to the empty set.
Remember that pretty much all tags can have event attributes that contain javascript code to be executed when the specified event occurs.
If you don't want to go down the HTMLPurifier kind of route, consider a different language, such as markdown (that this site uses) or some other wiki-like markup language; however, be sure to disable any use of passthrough HTML that may be allowed.

Strict HTML Validation and Filtering in PHP

I'm looking for best practices for performing strict (whitelist) validation/filtering of user-submitted HTML.
Main purpose is to filter out XSS and similar nasties that may be entered via web forms. Secondary purpose is to limit breakage of HTML content entered by non-technical users e.g. via WYSIWYG editor that has an HTML view.
I'm considering using HTML Purifier, or rolling my own by using an HTML DOM parser to go through a process like HTML(dirty)->DOM(dirty)->filter->DOM(clean)->HTML(clean).
Can you describe successes with these or any easier strategies that are also effective? Any pitfalls to watch out for?
I've tested all exploits I know on HTML Purifier and it did very well. It filters not only HTML, but also CSS and URLs.
Once you narrow elements and attributes to innocent ones, the pitfalls are in attribute content – javascript: pseudo-URLs (IE allows tab characters in protocol name - java script: still works) and CSS properties that trigger JS.
Parsing of URLs may be tricky, e.g. these are valid: http://spoof.com:xxx#evil.com or //evil.com.
Internationalized domains (IDN) can be written in two ways – Unicode and punycode.
Go with HTML Purifier – it has most of these worked out. If you just want to fix broken HTML, then use HTML Tidy (it's available as PHP extension).
User-submitted HTML isn't always valid, or indeed complete. Browsers will interpret a wide range of invalid HTML and you should make sure you can catch it.
Also be aware of the valid-looking:
<img src="http://www.mysite.com/logout" />
and
click
I used HTML Purifier with success and haven't had any xss or other unwanted input filter through. I also run the sanitize HTML through the Tidy extension to make sure it validates as well.
The W3C has a big open-source package for validating HTML available here:
http://validator.w3.org/
You can download the package for yourself and probably implement whatever they're doing. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of DOM parsers seem to be willing to bend the rules to allot for HTML code "in the wild" as it were, so it's a good idea to let the masters tell you what's wrong and not leave it to a more practical tool--there are a lot of websites out there that aren't perfect, compliant HTML but that we still use every day.

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