Upgrading PHP?

 

 

If you think that by upgrading to the latest version of PHP you will be more secure than before you might be wrong. Some security features such as magic quotes GPC and safe mode have been removed as of 5.4.

In HTTP all of the communication coming into a web app from the outside world happens via one of the 3 channels (Get, Post and Cookie). The magic quotes GPC feature automatically escapes the input.

In the newer versions of PHP it has been removed and now it is up to the developer to escape the user input accordingly. Problem is that newbie developers might not know that they have to do that. Other problem is with old legacy code which makes use of magic quotes. Businesses simply can not afford to re-code web applications according to the new standards. Other problem is that the resources available those learning PHP in many cases are out of date and contain code snippets and examples which are potentially vulnerable. That is why it is very important that only seasoned developers who code php the right way are hired for business critical web applications. Of course that will not be the low-tariff developers who cant even speak English.

The other removed feature “Safe Mode” was a handy setting which lets sys admins disable potentially dangerous PHP functionality used by exploits and rootkits (such as the functions which let php run custom code on the system shell (system(), shell_exec(), “, etc). Safe mode also prevents PHP from writing files to the file system. I would actually recommend that safe mode is kept on by default and only disabled if really needed.

The good news is that even though 5.3 is end of life – it still receives critical security updates. So for now you can secretly continue to run 5.3 on your server (which is recommended if you provide shared web hosting and you don’t need the new features). However, we don’t know how long that will continue to be the case. Also remember that there’s the option of running multiple versions of PHP on the same server (as FastCGI) if you are dying for traits or the new password hashing.