From: InfoSec News (alertsinfosecnews.org)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2007 - 00:03:43 CST

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/11/php_apps_security/

By Kelly Martin
SecurityFocus
11th January 2007

PHP has become the most popular application language on the web, but
common security mistakes by developers are giving PHP a bad name. Here's
how PHP coding errors have become the new low-hanging fruit for
attackers, contributing to the phishing problems on the web.

PHP became one of my favorite languages because of how quickly one can
write a highly functional, standards-based web application with a
database back-end. Unfortunately, attackers are taking these
applications down even faster than they appear.

I'm sure I'll receive my share of flames under this column - but this is
unfortunate, as I would hate to see such a nice language start to
languish - however, for many folks there's no easier way to compromise a
web server than to find a vulnerable application written in PHP.

The great rise of PHP

Let me start by saying that I'm a big fan of PHP and have written a
number of web applications with it over the years. It's a great language
that is now object-oriented, powerful and easy to learn, has a simple
syntax, integrated SQL connectors, and high performance. It's simple to
compile, very cross-platform, and has become arguably the dominant
language on the web - thousands of commercial and open-source
applications are available and in use.

The developers of PHP are doing many things right, from offering
excellent support, protecting intellectual property in commercial
applications, maintaining both the current release (5.x) and one prior,
extending the object oriented approach, working with the community, and
all sorts of other things. But not everything is rosy in the PHP world.

The problem is, PHP applications accounted for about 43 per cent of the
security issues in 2006, according to the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST). Diving deeper into this number, there's
the issue of determining who's most responsible for the problem. Do we
blame PHP itself for being an insecure language, or do we blame the many
inexperienced programers who have created vulnerable PHP applications
and released them to the world?

The fact is, the vast majority of vulnerabilities found in PHP
applications are due to poor programming practices, and are one step
away from the language itself. Poor programming is a security problem in
any language, but with PHP in particular the coding errors often lead to
common web security problems such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), include
file injection vulnerabilities, and database injection or manipulation
issues.

What strikes me is how the really basic mistakes pop up again and again.

A quick tour through the SecurityFocus vulnerability database and
Bugtraq and a website like milw0rm reveals many PHP applications ripe
for exploitation. Many require only very simple file inclusion exploits.
And that's exactly why some people are exploiting them. It's the
low-hanging fruit.

It only takes a few minutes to understand a typical web application's
coding errors and then search for vulnerable installations using Google.
In just a few minutes, an average attacker with little talent and even
less time can compromise a typical server.

While PHP application developers are by far the most responsible, there
have also been numerous vulnerabilities in the PHP language itself.
These are often harder to exploit, but when found they can affect the
entire base of installed PHP applications on the web. So there's really
two main issues at work here.

The recent departure of Stephan Esser from the internal PHP security
team should also raise some eyebrows, especially after reading the
explanation he gave on his blog about leaving the very group he founded.
Even as a user of PHP myself and having a passion for security, I wasn't
aware of some of the ongoing internal issues. Esser's Suhosin hardening
project looks like one that more people should check out.

I'm focusing on the user issues in this article, but the PHP Group can
still take some of the blame. They are the ones who design and grow the
language, and they've chosen to take a certain route - giving
application programmers more than enough rope to hang themselves, in
terms of security - just as any language does. Many developers,
including some very experienced ones, have indeed hung themselves due to
easily made mistakes that lead to poor security.

Anyone who's experienced a server compromise due to a PHP app they
didn't write and didn't audit has probably done some soul-searching and
become much more wary of all the free PHP apps. I really enjoy using
PHP, but I'm quite cautious of most applications unless it's one that is
a large and successful project with a real focus on security, a
dedicated security mailing list for announcements, and so on.

There are many infrastructure tools needed to secure a typical PHP web
server from an unknown developer's mistakes. While this is beyond the
scope of the article, I'll just list some of them here: web server
hardening, CHROOT/JAIL, PHP as a separate user, an IDS with daily
updates, a web application firewall, and a file integrity monitor to
help detect the inevitable server compromise.

The Windows defense?

PHP shouldn't be blamed for its popularity, so I don't want readers to
get the wrong idea. Many lower level languages like C/C++ are even more
popular and give developers far more rope to hang themselves than PHP.
Therefore, there are other issues at play.

Applications written in every language can, will, and have had a myriad
of security vulnerabilities over the years. It doesn't matter if it's
C++, Perl, ASP, Visual Basic, Python, or Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Every
language or rapid development framework has its strengths and
weaknesses. Personally, I've tended to avoid frameworks like Ruby on
Rails, for example, because it felt like I was drilling my own teeth
sometimes it's a little scary not knowing exactly what's going on
inside, just in case something goes wrong.

PHP has had the greatest appeal among new web programmers eager to build
database applications and support XML and Ajax. The language has
welcomed thousands of new programmers to the joy of programming. The PHP
Group should be proud of that. But it comes with a dark side.

I have no doubt that some PHP Group developers shake their head at the
very basic security mistakes that many new programmers make. The
problems are all over the web. They're user issues, so they probably
don't concern themselves with them. But they should.

The same mistakes are being made over and over again, and people aren't
learning. This is an opportunity for the PHP Group to provide something
new. How about a new SAFE_MODE that actually makes things safer in the
language, and doesn't try to do what can already be done with
infrastructure?

I'd like to see new defaults that limit include() and require() to only
allow local files, thereby avoiding remote file injection. It would be
nice to have a global way for a script to ignore all variables in the
URL, avoiding unexpected variable manipulation and XSS forgeries. Maybe
there's even a way to force users to filter input and escape output
every time, helping to avoid SQL injection and all sorts of other common
problems. That last one would go a long way.

It's an awful lot easier to compromise a typical LAMP server
(Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) than it is to exploit a full-patched modern
Windows desktop. It's not the OS, it's the application. Part of it is
the popularity of PHP itself that has put so many insecure applications
on the web, and part of it is how easy it is to make security mistakes
when coding PHP. Without a defense-in-depth infrastructure, which is
often lacking on a typical LAMP server, a PHP programming flaw often
results in a full web server compromise.

The short of it all is, PHP apps can be made secure, but far too many
are not.

The bigger picture

Why should the PHP Group care more about the mistakes of inexperienced
programmers? That's an easy one. Many websites being exploited today are
turned into phishing sites designed to steal money and identities from
people who don't even know what PHP is, and in many cases barely know
how to operate their own computer. In other words, the applications are
abused by the criminal element. PHP doesn't need to stand for Perfect
Haven for Phishing.

There are all sorts of automated scripts out there that search for
vulnerable PHP applications, exploit them when found, and then
automatically download a set of phishing HTML files and images that make
John's Awesome Blog suddenly look like the Bank of America's login page.
This also happens with ASP and Perl applications too, as well as those
written in other languages, but today PHP is far more popular a target.
That website owner, John, might be held responsible too if there weren't
dozens of these incidents each day.

I'm not saying the PHP Group is responsible, but they could help. As
architects of the language they should consider ways of hardening the
language and its defaults against some of the real basic mistakes so
many people are making.

I'm also not saying they should make PHP idiot-proof think of all the
wasted cycles and extra code trying to anticipate a thousand common
mistakes! But there's an opportunity to continue to grow PHP without
being at the expense of the security of the Internet as a whole.

If the PHP Group decides to take a leadership role in this, by adding
new features or functionality that help new programmers make fewer
common security mistakes, we'll all be better off.

This article originally appeared in Security Focus.

Copyright 2007, SecurityFocus

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