Re: PHP security (or the lack thereof)

[Jose Nazario <jose () monkey org>]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Darren Reed wrote:

> From my own mail archives, PHP appears to make up at least 4% of the 
> email to bugtraq I see - or over 1000 issues since 1995, out of the 
> 25,000 I have saved.

> People complain about applications like sendmail...in the same period, 
> it has been resopnsible for less than 200.

this is an unfair comparison, i think, and you're not the first to make 
such an argument. PHP is a language, one that lends itself to insecure 
paradigms and practices. but, so does C and it's built in string handling 
functions, and that's a similar source of security bugs over the years. 
Perl, in the wrong CGI programming hands, has caused a similar quantity of 
issues.

how many of those issues you are referring to are core PHP issues? looking 
through the stats provided by secunia for PHP 4 - PHP 5 i count up :

        version                 advisories listed by secunia
        -------                 ----------------------------
        PHP 5.1.x               7
        http://secunia.com/product/6796/

        PHP 5.0.x               13
        http://secunia.com/product/3919/

        PHP 4.4.x               9
        http://secunia.com/product/5768/

        PHP 4.3.x               20
        http://secunia.com/product/922/

        PHP 4.0.x               7
        http://secunia.com/product/1655/

so that's a total of 56 PHP core issues from PHP 4.0 onwards. unless PHP 
3.x and prior had over 944 such advisories in that time period (1995 til 
present, your timeframe), i suspect you just did something akin to:

        grep -i ^subject:.*php .*$ bugtraq.mbox

and looked at the results. hardly reflective of core PHP issues, given the 
wide number of PHP applications that have had bugtraq posts written about 
them.

my point is simple: if you're going to pick on something, compare apples 
to apples and not and oranges. if you pick on this huge flood of PHP apps 
that have had security holes, then pick on C for a similar numbers of bugs 
over the years. pick on Perl and the number of poorly written CGI scripts 
that have had security bulletins over the years. i'm sure a few more 
languages could easily be added to that list.

bear in mind i'm no PHP (or Perl, or C) bigot. but really, if you're going 
to complain about PHP, at least make your argument on reasonable grounds.

________
jose nazario, ph.d.                 jose () monkey org
http://monkey.org/~jose/            http://monkey.org/~jose/secnews.html
                                    http://www.wormblog.com/