WebApp Sec mailing list archives
phpBB Ban
From: Joseph Miller <joseph () tidetamerboatlifts com>
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:17:20 -0500
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Has anyone else here started using phpBB? After reading Andrew van der Stock's message, I was quite concerned about the security of phpBB. I had just installed this on one of my websites, and I was in the process of integrating it with my existing user database. After viewing very little of the code, I became extremely alarmed. I immediately deleted the forum from my website as this would be the perfect point of entry for an attacker looking for weak security code structure. Their idea of a mysql_escape_string() equivalent is a str_replace() that replaces all single quotes with two single quotes. This project is open source so it has no 'security through obscurity' even if that were the chosen method. Other code did some htmlspecialchars() for escaping, then checked the particular variable against explicit constants. How does this help? Either it matches or it doesn't, especially with single words that have no special characters in them. I am not a security expert nor do I purport to be one. However, this code, IMHO, demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of security. I don't think that they don't care about security, I just don't think that they understand it. I recommend a ban of this project from all websites that need any type of security until a preliminary review can be done of the security methods and approaches taken by the project. Not that I'm volunteering for the task, I'm probably just going to find another, more secure project. Besides, I'm unquestionably unqualified to do a code review for someone else's code. - -Joseph Miller -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFCO1NymXZROF+EADURAgJ0AJwOXtDbzdXpQS68Y4GHj7IOYoVa5QCeLbpz mAQr39BD41Jjanv7KEDBpwk= =WEEu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Current thread:
- phpBB Ban Joseph Miller (Mar 20)
- Re: phpBB Ban Daniel (Mar 22)
- Re: phpBB Ban Joseph Miller (Mar 22)
- Re: phpBB Ban Daniel (Mar 22)