summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/user_guide/general/security.html
blob: 1032014aee4ab00d627bbfa2997584f1b7248230 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Security : CodeIgniter User Guide</title>

<style type='text/css' media='all'>@import url('../userguide.css');</style>
<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' media='all' href='../userguide.css' />

<script type="text/javascript" src="../nav/nav.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../nav/prototype.lite.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../nav/moo.fx.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../nav/user_guide_menu.js"></script>

<meta http-equiv='expires' content='-1' />
<meta http-equiv= 'pragma' content='no-cache' />
<meta name='robots' content='all' />
<meta name='author' content='ExpressionEngine Dev Team' />
<meta name='description' content='CodeIgniter User Guide' />

</head>
<body>

<!-- START NAVIGATION -->
<div id="nav"><div id="nav_inner"><script type="text/javascript">create_menu('../');</script></div></div>
<div id="nav2"><a name="top"></a><a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="myHeight.toggle();"><img src="../images/nav_toggle_darker.jpg" width="154" height="43" border="0" title="Toggle Table of Contents" alt="Toggle Table of Contents" /></a></div>
<div id="masthead">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="width:100%">
<tr>
<td><h1>CodeIgniter User Guide Version 2.1.4</h1></td>
<td id="breadcrumb_right"><a href="../toc.html">Table of Contents Page</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<!-- END NAVIGATION -->


<!-- START BREADCRUMB -->
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="width:100%">
<tr>
<td id="breadcrumb">
<a href="http://codeigniter.com/">CodeIgniter Home</a> &nbsp;&#8250;&nbsp;
<a href="../index.html">User Guide Home</a> &nbsp;&#8250;&nbsp;
Security
</td>
<td id="searchbox"><form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"><input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" id="as_sitesearch" value="ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/" />Search User Guide&nbsp; <input type="text" class="input" style="width:200px;" name="q" id="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value="" />&nbsp;<input type="submit" class="submit" name="sa" value="Go" /></form></td>
</tr>
</table>
<!-- END BREADCRUMB -->

<br clear="all" />


<!-- START CONTENT -->
<div id="content">

<h1>Security</h1>

<p>This page describes some "best practices" regarding web security, and details
CodeIgniter's internal security features.</p>


<h2>URI Security</h2>

<p>CodeIgniter is fairly restrictive regarding which characters it allows in your URI strings in order to help
minimize the possibility that malicious data can be passed to your application.  URIs may only contain the following:
</p>

<ul>
<li>Alpha-numeric text</li>
<li>Tilde: ~ </li>
<li>Period: .</li>
<li>Colon: :</li>
<li>Underscore: _</li>
<li>Dash: -</li>
</ul>

<h2>Register_globals</h2>

<p>During system initialization all global variables are unset, except those found in the $_GET, $_POST, and $_COOKIE arrays. The unsetting
routine is effectively the same as register_globals = off.</p>

<a name="error_reporting"></a>
<h2>error_reporting</h2>

<p>
    In production environments, it is typically desirable to disable PHP's
    error reporting by setting the internal error_reporting flag to a value of 0. This disables native PHP
    errors from being rendered as output, which may potentially contain
    sensitive information.
</p>

<p>
    Setting CodeIgniter's <kbd>ENVIRONMENT</kbd> constant in index.php to a
    value of '<kbd>production</kbd>' will turn off these errors. In development
    mode, it is recommended that a value of '<kbd>development</kbd>' is used.
    More information about differentiating between environments can be found
    on the <a href="environments.html">Handling Environments</a> page.
</p>

<h2>magic_quotes_runtime</h2>

<p>The magic_quotes_runtime directive is turned off during system initialization so that you don't have to remove slashes when
retrieving data from your database.</p>

<h1>Best Practices</h1>

<p>Before accepting any data into your application, whether it be POST data from a form submission, COOKIE data, URI data,
XML-RPC data, or even data from the SERVER array, you are encouraged to practice this three step approach:</p>

<ol>
<li>Filter the data as if it were tainted.</li>
<li>Validate the data to ensure it conforms to the correct  type, length, size, etc. (sometimes this step can replace step one)</li>
<li>Escape the data before submitting it into your database.</li>
</ol>

<p>CodeIgniter provides the following functions to assist in this process:</p>

<ul>

<li><h2>XSS Filtering</h2>

<p>CodeIgniter comes with a Cross Site Scripting filter.  This filter looks for commonly
used techniques to embed malicious Javascript into your data, or other types of code that attempt to hijack cookies
or do other malicious things. The XSS Filter is described <a href="../libraries/security.html">here</a>.
</p>
</li>

<li><h2>Validate the data</h2>

<p>CodeIgniter has a <a href="../libraries/form_validation.html">Form Validation Class</a> that assists you in validating, filtering, and prepping
your data.</p>
</li>

<li><h2>Escape all data before database insertion</h2>

<p>Never insert information into your database without escaping it. Please see the section that discusses
<a href="../database/queries.html">queries</a> for more information.</p>

</li>

</ul>




</div>
<!-- END CONTENT -->


<div id="footer">
<p>
Previous Topic:&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="alternative_php.html">Alternative PHP</a>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&middot;&nbsp;&nbsp;
<a href="#top">Top of Page</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&middot;&nbsp;&nbsp;
<a href="../index.html">User Guide Home</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&middot;&nbsp;&nbsp;
Next Topic:&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="styleguide.html">PHP Style Guide</a>
</p>
<p><a href="http://codeigniter.com">CodeIgniter</a> &nbsp;&middot;&nbsp; Copyright &#169; 2006 - 2012 &nbsp;&middot;&nbsp; <a href="http://ellislab.com/">EllisLab, Inc.</a></p>
</div>

</body>
</html>