Pádraic Brady has a new post today sharing a tool he's created to enhance the current PHP file_get_contents function with a safer, more secure alternative, the humbug_get_contents library.

With the release of PHP 5.6, there was a significant security improvement in how PHP handled SSL/TLS protections, namely that it enabled a secure set of default options. Previously, SSL/TLS was disabled by default. No peer verification, no certificate checking, and a lack of configuration options had combined to create a serious problem. You can find this problem easily by searching for file_get_contents() on github and locating a call to this function used to retrieve any HTTP resource while also having zero configuration.

An excellent example of this is Composer which uses file_get_contents() instead of curl to ensure maximum compatibility with using systems. Of course, this beggars a question. If all the SSL/TLS protections are off by default in PHP 5.3-5.5…what’s stopping some irksome hacker from injecting bad code into our Composer downloads? Answer: Nothing.

The package provides a drop-in solution to the possible man-in-the-middle issues that could be caused by the native functionality. It enhances the current function with additional TLS/SSL checking for HTTPS requests on current PHP versions.