.. include:: /Includes.rst.txt .. _programming-secure-extensions: Programming Secure Extensions ============================= If you are not familiar with basic security best practices, we recommend that you take some time to lookup basic principles. Insecure extensions can seriously compromise the integrity of the database, lead to leaking of private information and other problems, which may be just annoying or have serious consequences. .. tip:: You will find some hints for secure programming with PHP in the PHP handbook: http://php.net/security In this section, we cover some relevant security aspects. Specifically, we will show you some concepts implemented by Extbase that increase the security of an extension. .. tip:: Basic principle #1: Never trust user input. All input data your extension gets from the user can be potentially malicious. That applies to all data being transmitted via GET and POST. You can never trust that the data really came from your form as it could have been manipulated. Cookies should be classified as potentially malicious as well, because they may have been manipulated. Always check if the format of the data corresponds with the format you expected. For example, for a field that contains an email address, you should check that a valid email address was entered and not any other text. For this, the :ref:`validating framework ` of Extbase (which we covered in the previous chapter), may be helpful. All data that comes from the user should be validated. This is especially critical where data is written to the database. In the next section we will show what you can do to handle this. We also present some concepts that Extbase and Fluid use internally to increase the security of an extension. We will show you how queries that change data are secured by Extbase. Next we cover Cross Site Scripting and illustrate how to secure your extensions. .. _create-own-database-queries: Create Own Database Queries --------------------------- Even though you will mostly use the :ref:`query language of Extbase ` to create database queries, there is an option to directly create SQL queries. That might be necessary for performance optimization. Always create your own SQL queries in repository classes, to have the potential unsafe code at a defined place. If you create your own SQL queries you always have to convert the input data to the desired format, for example to a number with the use of ``intval()``. .. _trusted-properties: Trusted Properties ------------------ .. danger:: Be aware that request hashes (HMAC) don't protect against **Identity** field manipulation. An attacker can modify the identity field value and then can update the value of another record, even if he doesn't usually have access to it. You have to implement your own validation for the Identity field value (verify ownership of the record, add another hidden field which validates the identity field value, etc..). In the section :ref:`mapping arguments ` we explained the transparent argument mapping: All properties that are to be sent, are changed transparently on the object. Certainly this implies a safety risk, that we will explain with an example: Assume we have a form to edit a ``user`` object. This object has the properties ``username, email, password`` and ``description``. We want to provide the user a form to change all properties, except the username (because the username should not be changed in our system). The form basically looks like this: .. code-block:: html If the form is sent, the argument mapping for the user object gets this array: .. code-block:: none [ __identity => ... email => ... password => ... description => ... ], Because the ``__identity`` property and further properties are set, the argument mapper gets the object from the persistence layer, makes a copy and then applies the changed properties to the object. After this normally we call the method ``update($user)`` for the corresponding repository to make the changes persistent. What happened if an attacker manipulates the form data and transfers an additional field ``username`` to the server? In this case the argument mapping would also change the ``$username`` property of the cloned object - although we did not want this property to be changed by the user itself. To avoid this problem, Fluid creates a hidden form field `__trustedProperties` which contains information about what properties are to be trusted. Once a request reaches the server, the property mapper of Extbase compares the incoming fields with the property names, defined by the `__trustedProperties` argument. As the content of said field could also be manipulated by the client, the field does not only contain a serialized array of trusted properties but also a hash of that array. On the server side, the hash is also compared to ensure the data has not been tampered with on the client side. So, only the form fields that are generated by Fluid with the appropriate ViewHelpers are transferred to the server. If an attacker tries to add a field on the client side, this is detected by the property mapper and an exception will be thrown. In general `__trustedProperties` should work completely transparently for you, you don't have to know how it works in detail. You have to know this background knowledge only if you want to change data via JavaScript or webservices. .. _prevent-cross-site-scripting: Prevent Cross Site Scripting ---------------------------- Fluid contains some integrated techniques to secure web applications by default. One of the important parts for this is the automatic prevention against cross site scripting, which is a common attack against web applications. In this section we give you a problem description and show how you can avoid cross site scripting (XSS). Assume you have programmed a forum. An "evil" user will get access to the admin account. For this he posted the following harmful looking message in the forum to try to embed JavaScript code:: When the forum post gets displayed, if the programmer of the forum has made no additional preventions, a JavaScript popup "XSS" will be displayed. The attacker now knows that every JavaScript he write in a post, is executed when displaying the post - the forum is vulnerable for cross site scripting. Now the attacker can replace the code with a more complex JavaScript program, that for example can read the cookies of the visitors of the forum and send them to a certain URL. If an administrator retrieves this prepared forum post, his session ID (that is stored in a cookie) is transferred to the attacker. In the worst case the attacker gets administrator privileges. How can we prevent this? We must encode all special characters with a call of ``htmlspecialchars()``. With this instead of ```` the safe result is delivered to the browser: ``<script>...</script>``. So the content of the script tag is no longer executed as JavaScript, but only displayed. But there is a problem with this: If you miss just once the encoding of the data, a XSS vulnerability exists in the system. In Fluid the output of every object accessor that occurs in a template is automatically processed by ``htmlspecialchars()``. But Fluid uses ``htmlspecialchars()`` only for templates with the extension *.html*, e.g. if the output format is set to HTML. If you use other output formats it is disabled and you have to make sure to convert the special characters correctly. It is also deactivated for object accessors that are used in arguments of a ViewHelper. A short example for this:: {variable1} a very long text The content of ``{variable1}`` is sent to htmlspecialchars(), the content of ``{variable2}`` is not changed. The ViewHelper must retrieve the unchanged data because we can not foresee what should be done with the data. For this reason ViewHelpers that output parameter directly have to handle special characters correctly.