Read the full checklist here
Damn, but security is hard. It’s not always obvious what needs doing, and the payoffs of good security are at best obscure. Who is surprised when it falls off our priority lists?
This security checklist aims to give developers a list of PHP security best practices they can follow to help improve the security of their code.
Here is a selection of some of the security checklist items:
Filter and Validate All Data
Regardless of where the data comes from, whether that’s a configuration file, server environment, GET and POST, or anywhere else, do not trust it. Filter and validate it! Do this by using one of the available libraries, such as zend-inputfilter.
Read more:
Use Parameterized Queries
To avoid SQL injection attacks, never concatenate or interpolate SQL strings with external data. Use parameterized queries instead and prepared statements. These can be used with vendor-specific libraries or by using PDO.
Learn more:
- Prepared statements and stored procedures in PDO
- Mysqli Prepared Statements
- The PostgreSQL pg_query_params function
Set open_basedir
The open_basedir
directive limits the files that PHP can access to the filesystem from the open_basedir
directory and downward. No files or directories outside of that directory can be accessed. That way, if malicious users attempt to access sensitive files, such as /etc/passwd
, access will be denied.
Read more:
- open_basedir configuration directive
- PHP Filesystem Security
- Isolated Execution Environments by DigitalOcean
Check Your SSL / TLS Configurations
Ensure that your server’s SSL/TLS configuration is up to date and correctly configured, and isn’t using weak ciphers, outdated versions of TLS, valid security certificates without weak keys, etc, by scanning it regularly.
Read more:
Check out the full checklist here
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