Summary
Due to have, a big developer community PHP is suffering from the security related issues a lot. Therefore, it is advisable to use secure coding practices for all sort of PHP developments and save your website from the plenty of vulnerability. There are user input data checking system and keeping off the error reporting are among the most desirable security aspects.
Introduction
Among all the programming languages, PHP is the easiest one to learn and start coding if you have any programming background or not. You simply need some basic HTML coding knowledge and some ideas about the syntax of programming at basic level, and of course, plenty of learning stuff at your side, you can start website development or edit your existing site in order to add some interactive and dynamic pages.
At the flip side, coding done by a fresher or inexperienced programmers may prove their website vulnerable to malicious attacks or some security breaches. If you want to save your website from such vulnerability, you should know some rules of secure PHP development or coding practices. Therefore, in this series I would like to introduce you to some valuable tips and rules to do secure PHP programming.
Validate User Data
The first rule is to create a system that can check and prevent your website from the data input done by all the users of your website, without any exception. If you think your website is useless for hackers and don’t have any chances to have malicious user. You might going in wrong because if there is no bad intended user come on your site, but your good users can commit some mistakes that may cost you dearly.
Therefore, it is advisable to check each data entered or action done through effective security measures. Here simple client-side validations using some JavaScript like weak measure won’t work and you need some strong measures to avoid further security breaches. Thus, trusting any user is insane act at security point of view.
Turn Off Error Messages
For a PHP web developer error message is life line to get insight about the development and mistakes she had committed before. Therefore, we are keeping error messaging system turn on always during our PHP web development environment. That is good, but worst for a live website as it can handover all clues and information regarding to your code, documents and databases as well as related web applications in directly. Therefore, it is advisable that you set “error_reporting” to ‘0’ value in ,htaccess or php.ini files in source code.
PHP Development 