I recently came across this article:

"Apple, Microsoft, PHP headline IBM's list of most vulnerable software"

This article once again demonstrates the cluelessness that some people have regarding what PHP is. First of all, PHP is not a vendor, so "Apple, Microsoft & PHP" does not make much sense. Furthermore, the only reason PHP even is mentioned in this context is that Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress appear in the list. So PHP, a programming language, gets blamed for the security flaws that are in these packages.

With the same data, I might conclude that C is more insecure than PHP, after all there are more C-based vendors/product in the list than PHP products.

But they're not just clueless about PHP, they also list Linux as a Vendor in their top 10 list. Linux is an operating system, not a vendor.

Sometimes I wish these reporters would talk to people that know what their talking about before they write such an article.

On a regular basis, I still encounter the following conversation:

"What do you do against SQL injection?"
"I escape the data."
"How?"
"addslashes"

This is not the best way to escape data. The most important reason is security. addslashes can lure you into a false sense of security. As Chris Shiflett points out, there are situations that addslashes doesn't escape.

Use mysql_real_escape_string instead.

When using a different database, such as Oracle, addslashes won't help either: the single quote escape for MySQL is \', but for oracle it's '' (a double single quote). For each database there is an alternative to mysql_real_escape_string.

An even better way to handle this problem is to use prepared statements, for example with PDO. PDO uses prepared statement capabilities of the database if supported, or emulates it when it isn't supported. In a prepared statement, it is a lot harder to exploit SQL injections.

Many people know about the disadvantages of addslashes, and it's even covered in the ZCE exam, but still a lot of people use addslashes. Probably one of the main reasons is that the documentation at php.net still states this:

An example use of addslashes() is when you're entering data into a database. For example, to insert the name O'reilly into a database, you will need to escape it. Most databases do this with a \ which would mean O\'reilly."

The comments in the manual mention the problems, but many developers will not read those.

So even if this is old news, it's good to draw attention to it every once in a while.

I just released ATK 6.1; It contains several new features such as Ajax based dialogs, a new language file (Indonesian), and several bug fixes.

The most important however is that it fixes an XSS vulnerability based on the usage of $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"] that we had overlooked.

It is recommended to upgrade ATK applications to ATK 6.1.

The release can be found on http://www.achievo.org/atk/download

The changelog is included in the release, and at http://www.achievo.org/atkdemo/atk/doc/CHANGES

Yesterday someone reported a security issue in bugtraq:

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/23992/info

Although the issue was reported directly to SecurityFocus and not to us, I want to stress that this is a bug in an old version of Achievo. Version 1.2 that was released over a year ago already had a fix for this issue. (The report originally didn't mention this but I had them include the info on 1.2 when I discovered the report.)

Those of you still running Achievo 1.1 are advised to upgrade to the latest stable version of Achievo, 1.2.1.

If that is not an option, the issue can be fixed in two ways:

• Make sure that register_globals is turned off in php.ini. The problem is not present when this setting is turned off.
• Edit index.php, and add the line $config_atkroot = "./"; right in front of the include of atk.inc

When in doubt, or if you have questions according to this issue, please consult the Achievo forum or contact me directly.