发布于 2015-08-01 11:31:24 | 263 次阅读 | 评论: 0 | 来源: 网络整理
Below we'll review common security principles and describe how to avoid threats when developing applications using Yii.
There are two main principles when it comes to security no matter which application is being developed:
Filter input means that input should never be considered safe and you should always check if the value you've got is actually among allowed ones. For example, if we know that sorting could be done by three fields title
, created_at
and status
and the field could be supplied via user input, it's better to check the value we've got right where we're receiving it. In terms of basic PHP that would look like the following:
$sortBy = $_GET['sort'];
if (!in_array($sortBy, ['title', 'created_at', 'status'])) {
throw new Exception('Invalid sort value.');
}
In Yii, most probably you'll use form validation to do alike checks.
Escape output means that depending on context where we're using data it should be escaped i.e. in context of HTML you should escape <
, >
and alike special characters. In context of JavaScript or SQL it will be different set of characters. Since it's error-prone to escape everything manually Yii provides various tools to perform escaping for different contexts.
SQL injection happens when query text is formed by concatenating unescaped strings such as the following:
$username = $_GET['username'];
$sql = "SELECT * FROM user WHERE username = '$username'";
Instead of supplying correct username attacker could give your applications something like '; DROP TABLE user; --
. Resulting SQL will be the following:
SELECT * FROM user WHERE username = ''; DROP TABLE user; --'
This is valid query that will search for users with empty username and then will drop user
table most probably resulting in broken website and data loss (you've set up regular backups, right?).
In Yii most of database querying happens via Active Record which properly uses PDO prepared statements internally. In case of prepared statements it's not possible to manipulate query as was demonstrated above.
Still, sometimes you need raw queries or query builder. In this case you should use safe ways of passing data. If data is used for column values it's preferred to use prepared statements:
// query builder
$userIDs = (new Query())
->select('id')
->from('user')
->where('status=:status', [':status' => $status])
->all();
// DAO
$userIDs = $connection
->createCommand('SELECT id FROM user where status=:status')
->bindValues([':status' => $status])
->queryColumn();
If data is used to specify column names or table names the best thing to do is to allow only predefined set of values:
function actionList($orderBy = null)
{
if (!in_array($orderBy, ['name', 'status'])) {
throw new BadRequestHttpException('Only name and status are allowed to order by.')
}
// ...
}
In case it's not possible, table and column names should be escaped. Yii has special syntax for such escaping which allows doing it the same way for all databases it supports:
$sql = "SELECT COUNT($column) FROM {{table}}";
$rowCount = $connection->createCommand($sql)->queryScalar();
You can get details about the syntax in Quoting Table and Column Names.
XSS or cross-site scripting happens when output isn't escaped properly when outputting HTML to the browser. For example, if user can enter his name and instead of Alexander
he enters <script>alert('Hello!');</script>
, every page that outputs user name without escaping it will execute JavaScript alert('Hello!');
resulting in alert box popping up in a browser. Depending on website instead of innocent alert such script could send messages using your name or even perform bank transactions.
Avoiding XSS is quite easy in Yii. There are generally two cases:
If all you need is plain text then escaping is as easy as the following:
<?= yiihelpersHtml::encode($username) ?>
If it should be HTML we could get some help from HtmlPurifier:
<?= yiihelpersHtmlPurifier::process($description) ?>
Note that HtmlPurifier processing is quite heavy so consider adding caching.
CSRF is an abbreviation for cross-site request forgery. The idea is that many applications assume that requests coming from a user browser are made by the user himself. It could be false.
For example, an.example.com
website has /logout
URL that, when accessed using a simple GET, logs user out. As long as it's requested by the user itself everything is OK but one day bad guys are somehow posting <img src="http://www.yiichina.com/docs/guide/2.0/http://an.example.com/logout">
on a forum user visits frequently. Browser doesn't make any difference between requesting an image or requesting a page so when user opens a page with such img
tag he's being logged out from an.example.com
.
That's the basic idea. One can say that logging user out is nothing serious. Well, sending POST isn't much trickier.
In order to avoid CSRF you should always:
By default server webroot is meant to be pointed to web
directory where index.php
is. In case of shared hosting environments it could be impossible to achieve so we'll end up with all the code, configs and logs in server webroot.
If it's the case don't forget to deny access to everything except web
. If it can't be done consider hosting your application elsewhere.
In debug mode Yii shows quite verbose errors which are certainly helpful for development. The thing is that these verbose errors are handy for attacker as well since these could reveal database structure, configuration values and parts of your code. Never run production applications with YII_DEBUG
set to true
in your index.php
.
You should never enalble Gii at production. It could be used to get information about database structure, code and to simply rewrite code with what's generated by Gii.
Debug toolbar should be avoided at production unless really necessary. It exposes all the application and config details possible. If you absolutely need it check twice that access is properly restricted to your IP only.