Thursday, July 10, 2008

Back From the Dead

So my... third... foray into blogging about my life has so far been a pretty spectacular failure, no updates for 3 months? Lose.

So, just for kicks I've been writing a small PHP authentication library for myself lately, nothing too fancy or spectacular, and it's been kicking my ass.

The basic structure is simple - once authenticated, the system stores some data in a cookie - the username and a hash of a various bunch of things, including the user's password. As the user moves about my site the system just checks the hash for validity. Elementary, but works well enough for a low-traffic site that doesn't demand iron-clad security.

$cookie = sanitize($cookie);
parse_str($cookie, $output);


Simple? Not quite:

Input:
username=potato&phash=9ee26cb97a7e32d9c0f1c02199295bc3

Expected output:
Array
(
[username] => potato
[phash] => 9ee26cb97a7e32d9c0f1c02199295bc3
)
Actual output:
Array
(
['username] => potato
[phash] => 9ee26cb97a7e32d9c0f1c02199295bc3\'
)

What the, how did those quotes sneak in there? Worse yet... if I run this on my dev box locally (OS X):
Array
(
[\'username] => potato
[phash] => 9ee26cb97a7e32d9c0f1c02199295bc3\'
)

Notice the difference? PHP was friendly enough to provide this explanation:

Note: The magic_quotes_gpc setting affects the output of this function, as parse_str() uses the same mechanism that PHP uses to populate the $_GET, $_POST, etc. variables.


Which means that, as a means for security, quotes and slashes get escaped properly. Great. I don't see any quotes or slashes in my input. What gives? Google hasn't turned up anything relevant, so I'm unfortunately stuck on this.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

turn off magic quotes?

Anonymous said...

Are you sure the sanitize function isn't doing something weird?

I just tried to duplicate it on my MacBook and worked fine.

Running PHP 5.2.5 with magic_quotes_gpc turned on.

eric m said...

Thanks for not using the Internet verb 'Fail'. I would've stopped reading right then and there.

Unknown said...

this post fails at fail

Ars said...

Why are you using sanitize or parse_str?

Use $_COOKIE[]

Eric TF Bat said...

I agree with commie: anything in PHP with the word "magic" in it is doomed to (pardon my language) FAIL. Switch off that and the other childish hand-holding settings and just program defensively.

And yes, $_COOKIE is your friend.

Anonymous said...

Not a platform-specific bug, a programmer-specific bug.

Zend has advised you turn off the hand-holding settings for years now (they're off by default in PHP5).