Ultimate PHP Security Best Practices

It is the duty of a developer to protect the web applications from all possible sources of attacks. A web developer should make sure that the application is protective enough and it doesn't have any security issues or loopholes. The web developer should be able to find out the vulnerabilities in the application and take steps to secure it or protect it from threats and provide solutions accordingly.

PHP is a popular language for web development. Many of the popular frameworks such as Wordpress and Magento have PHP as a web developing language. Thus it is very important to have the right and ultimate PHP security tools that will save the web development from any kind of vulnerabilities.

Thus there are some practices through which you can protect PHP from all kinds of threats and all possible attacks. Let us discuss some of them in this blog.

1. Update PHP regularly

Right now PHP is the popular language used in many popular frameworks around the globe. The most stable and preferable version of PHP right now is PHP 7.2.8. you must keep updating PHP to latest versions to keep it up to date and secure. You will need to update your code and change some functional logic. There are also some tools available which help in securing PHP and to check the depreciation of your code. These are some of the tools-

1. PHP 7 compatibility checker

2. PHP 7 Mar

3. Phan

2. SQL injection attacks

The next factor that should be checked is SQL injection. An SQL injection is the most common attack in PHP scripting. In SQL injection the attacker finds out the code from your codebase where direct MySQL queries are executed on the database by accepting other inputs.

If an attacker is successful to hack the application from the SQL query error shown on the browser, he can get access to your information they are looking for. Thus, SQL injection protection is very important to maintain the security of your website.

3. Cross-site scripting (XSS)

Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks inject dangerous and malicious javascript into your website which runs in the browsers. It can even change the content of your page and steal information to send it to the attacker. The attacker can steal cookies, sessions and other sensitive information about the browser. There is a possibility that an attacker or hacker may submit comments with JavaScript which could run in every other user’s browsers and steal their login cookie. You need to ensure that users cannot inject active JavaScript content into your pages. XSS attacks can also execute via attributes, encoded URI schemes and code encoding.

4. Validation on both sides

Validation should always be done on both sides-browser and server side. The browsers can catch simple failures like mandatory fields that are empty and when you enter text into a numbers field. For e.g., while filling a form, in place of email ID, you cannot type whatever you wish to. If there will be no Validation, the right format will not be inserted. You should make sure to check for these validations at the server side as failing to do so could lead to malicious code or scripting code being inserted into the database.

5. Keep a strong password

Whenever you download a new application, while signing up it asks you to create a strong password which contains alphabets, numbers as well as special characters. They ask for a strong password so that your account doesn't fall into wrong hands who may misuse your account for wrong practices. Passwords are the security of any website/application/store etc and it has to be strong enough so that it doesn't become accessible to anyone else other than you.

Users might not like it or feel its irritating but enforcing password such as a minimum of eight characters, including an uppercase letter, number and characters will protect the information of your website for the long run. So spare some time, think of a strong password and protect your website.

6. Avoid file uploads

Allowing users to upload files on your website contains website security risks. The risk is that any file uploaded can contain a script that can affect your website’s working and steal the information. If you have a file upload from the user then you have to treat all the files carefully. If you allow users to upload images, you need to verify because the image file can easily be faked. So make sure to restrict file uploads on your website to keep your website secure and protected.

In a nuthsell..

Well, PHP security best practices is a vast topic and developers from around the globe try to develop different tools and practices to secure their web apps. Any loopholes or vulnerabilities found on the website can be harmful and affect the working of the website as when there are vulnerabilities, there are chances of attacks and hacking. In this blog, I have covered some of the PHP security practices to help you understand how you can secure your PHP projects from different attacks and threats. Do you know of other practices apart from the ones I mentioned above? If yes, don't hesitate in mentioning them in the comment section below.