On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 06:32:06PM -0500, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:

> I think people generally follow the path of least resistance and for  
> compat purposes I suspect most application will simply create a quick  
> wrapper to **untaint** all input data so they can use it within their  
> application without worrying about tainting getting in the way.

More fool them.

> Tainting may have helped if you are using straight forward data, but  
> what happens when you start doing appending or passing data through  
> string modification operations. I almost guarantee that there will be  
> a series of operations or function calls that if executed in a  
> certain order will mask tainted input making it appear safe. I'd  
> gladly provide you with examples, but there is no sample code, if I  
> have time I'll take a peak at Perl and Ruby that implement tainting  
> and see if a quick taint bypass can be devised.

OK: so there may be a few cases where it won't work, that does not mean
that there won't be great advantages for the majority of situations.

> All it means that this breaks every applications and the security  
> benefits are somewhat ambiguous, but in all fairness the full  
> consequences are hard to predict without sample code.

It is OFF by default.
RegisterGlobals was initially ON by detault since loosing it broke
a lot of code. PHP survived that.

-- 
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/

#include <std_disclaimer.h>

-- 
PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

Reply via email to