Given that PHP is designed to be used to write applications that run on web servers, you’d think it would have been designed rather more with security in mind.<\/p>\n
In particular, PHP’s dynamic typing seems to be a source of security weaknesses. Dynamic typing has advantages in rapid development and code malleability but is not particularly helpful for writing secure code – security is greatly helped by being able to restrict each variable to a specific set of values and having the compiler enforce this.<\/p>\n
Similarly with the SQL API – because the interface is all just strings instead of strongly typed objects, SQL injection vulnerabilities becomes all to easy to write.<\/p>\n
Variable scope is another one – because there are no variable declarations it’s not obvious where variables are introduced, so one could be using variables declared earlier without realizing it (this is why register_globals changed from default-on, to default-off, to deprecated to removed).<\/p>\n
Then there are ill-concieved features like magic quotes, and missing features like cryptographically secure random number generation.<\/p>\n
A well-designed language for web development would be secure by default when doing the most obvious thing – one shouldn’t have to go out of one’s way to learn what all the security pitfalls are and have to write to explicitly address each of them (and update your code when the next such pitfall is discovered).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Given that PHP is designed to be used to write applications that run on web servers, you’d think it would have been designed rather more with security in mind. In particular, PHP’s dynamic typing seems to be a source of security weaknesses. Dynamic typing has advantages in rapid development and code malleability but is not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":819,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions\/819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}