Designing a Secure website with PHP

 Do you have a secure website? Having a secured website with PHP is a necessity now as sites are hacked regularly. When you build your website with PHP, it is good to know how to safely secure and protect your website from malicious attacks. PHP security is a safe way to protect your site as it prevents unauthorized access to your site’s data and you are able to maintain the sensitive information and data’s integrity. PHP Development Company in Hyderabad not only builds PHP websites securely but also assists you in validating and sanitizing data on your site.

Data validation

PHP application development company works with an excellent application team who have the expertise to safeguard your app from receiving any input that affects the performance of your app.  But there’s also a good formula here and that is”Do not trust the input given by the user.”

You do not know about the user who is sending out his/her input and the user may try to attack your app by entering bad input. If you are able to validate and filter the incoming data, you can continue to have a secure application.

Find out more about the incoming data

Where and how the data is coming? Find out more about the sources and you’ll learn more about it. If there’s anyone trying to hack your site and if you are accepting the data that is coming in, your site is vulnerable as you are allowing the users to navigate on your site unauthorized.

For instance, you came across a user who’s adding comments to your comment form and the user leaves a name, email id and comment.  When they leave their comment, the script processes the comment and adds it to a database. PHP web development services verifies that the data is correct and the type of data along with the limit on the length of data.

If the user enters a comment that has a bad JavaScript code in it, and when it is run and shown on the HTML page, the code might redirect the user to a bad web page.  To protect your website or application from such kinds of attacks, you can run the input data through strip tags () to remove any tags present in it.

While showing data in the browser, write as

Htmlentities () function on the data.

Seek protection from CSRF attacks

Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack is where the attacker tries to trick the victim to load sensitive information without their interest or knowledge. This occurs in web applications which are bad in code to trigger business logic using GET requests. PHP Web Services understands that GET requests which should be used only for accessing information and not for performing transactions. GET requests mean that the same page can be accessed any number of times without causing any side effects.

The following is a poor design of application code that supports CSRF attacks:

<?php

if (isset($_REQUEST[“name”], $_REQUEST[“amount”])) {

    // process the request and transfer the amount from

    // from the logged in user to the passed name.

}

As an example, assume that Gopal wants to perform CSRF attack on Suman and constructs a URL like the following and sends it to Suman in an email:

<a href=”http://example.com/process.php?name=Gopal&amount=500″>Visit My WebSite</a>

The browser can’t display any image, but it will still make the request using the URL which will make a transaction without intimating Suman.

The solution is to process any function that alters the database state in POST request and avoid using $_REQUEST. Use $_GET to retrieve GET parameters, and use $_POST to retrieve POST parameters.

Conclusion

PHP is an open source, server-side HTML embed script language that is most useful in creating dynamic web pages. PHP pages have the extension .php and it can perform any task that any CGI program can do, but its main benefit lies in the compatibility with many types of databases. As PHP is available to the public for free, it is not only popular, but there are many uses with PHP that include – eCommerce, Content Management, Blogs, Forums/Bulletin Boards can be successfully built and effectively managed. PHP Web Development Company in Hyderabadoffers a wide array of PHP services, safe and secure websites.