I have finally gotten some time to do some long awaited work on PHPUnit. The first on my agenda was a small improvement to filtering. This was related to ticket #526. Essentially I added the ability to do both white list and black list filtering.

Besides the Include methods you can add to the data set's filtering, you can also add in Exclude filters to remove the data you don't want in the set. They can also be combined to customize your data set to your heart's content.

From the first, top 17:

Application security should not be a "when all else fails" situation. It's not something you can "put in later". As we've mentioned before, there is no single silver bullet to solve your application security issues. Security is something that should be rolling around in the back of your dead in the design phase, the coding phase, the testing phase, even after you've rolled your code into production.

And, from tip #18:

When you allow users to upload files, your system may be at risk. Always restrict the file types that you allow. Don't rely on a blacklist approach. [...] Be careful with file uploads and make sure you protect them with a whitelist policy instead. Make sure that the file that has been uploaded is of the type that you want to allow.

I like Zend Framework's Zend_Filter class. It's basically a set of methods for validating untrusted data. Although the two arguably most important features isEmail() and isUri() (the latter can be worked around with Zend_Uri) are still missing, the whole thing looks promising already.

He starts with a few of his thoughts on the package ("Clean up the code of isHostname", "International support for isPhone") and some code to show how it can be implemented - filtering for use in a regular expression, validation of a string by a character whitelist as well as blacklisting, and using the Zend_Filter module for a more flexible isName.]]> Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:20:37 -0600