ProPHP Security

Published by: Apress

Authors: Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell

Book Site | Sample Chapter: Preventing SQL Injection | Table of Contents

At first, I thought this book was all about cleaning your input variables and filtering your output, XSS attacks, SQL injections but I was most presently surprised to find that it was that and so much more! In fact, I would have called this “ProPHP Security and Administration” instead! It is absolutely fantastic. It really is about security in all of the facets of web development - from server, to code, to database to the system users.

The book is divided into 4 parts:

- Part 1: The Importance of Security

- Part 2: Maintaining a Secure Environment

- Part 3: Practicing Secure PHP Programming

- Part 4: Practicing Secure Operations

Here are some brief overviews of the sections and the tidbits I found interesting:

Part 1:

The first part is the shortest and gives a general overview the what and why of security.

Part 2:

The second is much more hearty and goes into detail about Shared hosts and why they are secure and how to make the more so. It even dips into alternatives for the traditional shared hosts and goes into Virtual Machines. This is valuable to not only to administrators but to PHP Developers. After reading this, I understand the “why” behind many of the things about shared hosting that I found frustrating.

One of the most important things I found in this chapter is how to maintain separate development and production environments. When I was helping to set this up at one of my past jobs it was a topic that I couldn’t find much information about. It also makes mention of version control, using wikis, bug tracking, sandbox and testing! Oh and here’s a concept…. pretend your live system failed — how well does your backup plan work?

How many times have I thought, I should make a cron job to back up my database to my home server every day/week? Have I ever done this? No! But now I have no excuse! Backing up a database and storing remotely is one of the sections in this chapter and code included! Fantastic.

There are chapters about Encryption theory and practice which I read several times to understand. It was interesting but it wasn’t something I have to do right now in my life, but I will return to this book to refresh my memory when I do.

Securing Network connections SSL and SSH, these proved helpful as I have become the “Reluctant System Admin” for one of my projects — partly because if they were to hire a part time person I’d rather they get a CSS person and I’d rather do the sys admin!

The Controlling Access section goes into details about using certificates with php, single sign-on, basic and digest http authentication … whoa this is some deep stuff! But good, when I was looking into this for a project a few years ago I couldn’t find anything helpful. It continues with then permissions and restrictions, a lot about Unix permissions and keeping things running where they should, securing databases and PHP Safe mode!

Part 3

Finally — the stuff that I thought the book would be about - validating user input, filtering output, preventing cross site scripting attempts, remote execution.. so much more to security than I thought! It talks about securing temp files, I always assumed the OS handled this and I didn’t need to worry.

Part 4

Ahh — Practicing Secure Operations… all you ever wanted to know about making sure your users are humans, verifying your users, setting roles for users, logging your users actions, preventing data loss, executing system commands safely, working with webservices and finally Peer Reviews! Sometimes it’s that extra pair of eyes that can see things you miss.

Something I find interesting - in the section about preventing data loss, it talks about setting a flag on records that are “deleted” and then making a db view of the “good” data and using that to select from. One of the things I like in Ruby On Rails is this “acts_as_paranoid” model option that does about the same thing. Neato.

Pro PHP Security is a most excellent read and so much deeper than my brief overview here. It will be a handy book on my shelf to keep me on my toes regarding security in all areas of web development, from the server to the code, to the users, to best practices of security you will find this is a helpful book too!