Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output

Re:Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output by simias on Thursday February 27, 2020 @09:13AM (#22433380)

I blame PHP. Many webdevs active today started with it, and the standard library's solution to injections was escaping everything half a dozen times just in case. Because PHP being PHP nobody saw any red flags when they implemented a function named "mysql_real_escape_string". Apparently they've deprecated these functions since then, but the damage is done.

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Re:Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output by ivanhoe on Thursday February 27, 2020 @12:04PM (#22435144)

But that's not a thing for 15 years or more? PDO was added around 2005, and even before that anyone in their right mind used mysqli extension for prepared statements. Since 2012 you can't even use the mysql extension without getting a depreciation warning.

And yes, in 90s php's security sucked, but that was nothing php specific, it was just the sentiment of that time. Everyone did it, in all languages. I remember using tons of $dbh->do() in Perl's DBI back then, intentionally avoiding to prepare statements for a quick and dirty stuff (and most of the scripts back then were quick and dirty stuff). It's in a big part because we were used to building desktop apps and thinking in terms of security that applied for them like being careful about your pointers and input strings lengths and stack overflows and stuff. Web was still pretty new thing.

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Re:Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output by teh_klev on Thursday February 27, 2020 @01:11PM (#22435938)

> But that's not a thing for 15 years or more? PDO was added around 2005

Ex-shared hosting bod here, who had the joy of managing our PHP environments :(

Sadly in the real world, even after the great big (and pointless) act of deprecating and removing the mysql_* library, naive developers (and experienced ones that should've know better) just moved onto mysqli_* or PDO and still used string concatenation with raw inputs, instead of learning how to parameterise their queries.

Used to drive me flippin' nuts.

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Re:Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output by ivanhoe on Friday February 28, 2020 @07:55AM (#22442427)

> naive developers (and experienced ones that should've know better) just moved onto mysqli_* or PDO and still used string concatenation with raw inputs, instead of learning how to parameterise their queries.

True, I stand corrected, I've just checked and Wordpress still does it just like that: https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-includ...

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Re:Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output by hinkley on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:37PM (#22448852)

The one and only time I argued with someone about PHP, the forum the guy ran got hacked the very next morning and was running a botnet of some sort. I was smug but quiet, and I never really thought about it but the timing makes me wonder if he thought I was involved.

Anyway, there’s a patch release the next day, and somewhere I find the diff. Now I can’t read PHP but I know what string concatenation looks like, especially if someone does a diff on it. I’ll be damned if the diff didn’t fix one SQL string concatenation that was less than five lines from code with the same structure. Scsry.

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Re:Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output by nakkijono on Thursday February 27, 2020 @12:47PM (#22435651)

PHP and vulnerable example code is an additional thing. Most people just copypaste from tutorials. For example, the first search result for "PHP mysql example" gives you the wrong example first https://www.w3schools.com/php/php_mysql_select.asp

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