This document is provided as a supplement to Security for developers. This is a list of common development tasks, and the security measures that need to be taken.
[edit] Security checklist
| If you are working with ... |
have you ... |
[edit] Cookies
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- reduced reviewer anxiety by using $wgRequest instead of
$_COOKIE?
- fetched cookies using
$wgRequest->getCookie(...)?
- set cookies using
$wgRequest->response()->setcookie(...)?
# Attempt to fetch the UserID cookie value. Note: The
# value returned isn't trusted and is forced to be an int.
$sId = intval( $wgRequest->getCookie( 'UserID' ) );
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[edit] Dynamic code generation
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Avoid using functions like eval() and create_function(), as well as the /e pattern modifier for preg_replace(). While powerful and convenient, these features are inherently insecure:[1][2]
- it's easier to put arbitrary strings into text processed by a regular expressions, which – when combined with the
/e pattern modifier – can lead to code injection attacks.
- it is harder to read and maintain code that is part of a string.
- static analysis tools won't catch warnings and errors in the code.
- opcode caches (like APC) can't cache code mixed into strings.
create_function() sometimes has garbage-collection issues.- A loop which has a
create_function() inside will create a new function on each iteration.
Sometimes you really do need these features (obviously eval.php needs to run eval() ;) but in most cases, we'd rather see the function broken out and referred as a callback.
For future code that runs only under PHP 5.3 and later, note that inline lambda functions will make it easier to make your callback inline while retaining the benefits of code that's written in native syntax instead of strings.
- Anything external that is used in part of regex should be escaped with preg_quote( $externalStr, $delimiter ). It puts a backslash in front of every character that is part of the regular expression syntax, and escapes also the delimiter given as second parameter:
$str = preg_replace( "!" . preg_quote( $externalStr, '!' ) . "!", $replacement, $str );
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[edit] External programs
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// escape any naughty characters
$cmd = wfEscapeShellArg( $cmd ) . ' --version';
$err = wfShellExec( $cmd, $retval ); // run $cmd
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[edit] GET data
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- reduced reviewer anxiety by using
$wgRequest instead of $_GET?
# Check if the action parameter is set to 'purge'
if ( $wgRequest->getVal( 'action' ) == 'purge' ) {
...
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[edit] Global variables
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# ensure that the script can't be executed outside of MediaWiki
if ( ! defined( 'MEDIAWIKI' ) ) {
echo "Not a valid entry point";
exit( 1 );
}
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[edit] Output (API, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, XML, etc.)
Any content that MediaWiki generates can be a vector for XSS attacks.
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- used the
Html and Xml helper classes?
# rawElement() escapes all attribute values
# (which, in this case, is provided by $myClass)
echo Html::rawElement( 'p', array( 'class' => $myClass ) );
- reduced reviewer anxiety by using ResourceLoader to deliver CSS and JavaScript resources?
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[edit] User provided CSS
User provided CSS (Say for use in a style attribute) needs to be sanitized to prevent XSS, as well as to disallow insertion of tracking images (via background-image), etc
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- Use the Sanitizer::checkCss method for any css received from a user, possibly along with the Html class.
# let $CSSFromUser be the user's CSS.
echo Html::rawElement( 'p', array( 'style' => Sanitizer::checkCss( $CSSFromUser ) ) );
- For CSS provided by the extension (and not the user), this is not needed (and will remove some valid things like background-image:). However, extension provided CSS should go in stylesheets loaded by ResourceLoader, and not in style attributes.
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[edit] POST data
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- reduced reviewer anxiety by using
$wgRequest instead of $_POST
- Always validate that any POST data received is what you expect it to be
# Check if the action parameter is set to 'render'
if ( $wgRequest->getVal( 'action' ) == 'render' ) {
...
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[edit] Query strings
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[edit] Sessions
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[edit] Reviewer anxiety
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- clearly commented unexpected or odd parts of your code?
# $wgRequest isn't yet available. Forced to use $_GET instead.
if ( isset( $_GET['setupTestSuite'] ) ) {
$setupTestSuiteName = $_GET['setupTestSuite'];
...
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[edit] SQL queries
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[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ↑ Special:Code/MediaWiki/78046#c12250
- ↑ bugzilla:21526#c14
