Re: FW: PHP 4.x session spoofing

From: Gunzour (gunzour@yahoo.com)
Date: 01/15/02


Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 05:17:12 -0800 (PST)
From: Gunzour <gunzour@yahoo.com>
To: daniel@lorch.cc, bugtraq@securityfocus.com


I reported this to bugs.php.net over a year ago (bug
#8189) and more recently I wrote an article for a PHP
website about the use of PHP sessions for
authentication, although that article has not yet been
published.

> Since PHP4 there is a native support for sessions,
> which was derived
> from the PHPLib. But instead of using a SQL backend
> to store these
> IDs, they chose to store them as files in /tmp.

You can configure PHP to store sessions in an SQL
database with session_set_save_handler. That will add
to the complexity of your configuration, but will
probably not make it any more secure. (How secure is
your SQL backend?)

> I suggest to create a directory called
>
> mkdir /tmp/php_sessions/

You're still in the /tmp directory, so there's still a
potential for misuse. I could do "mv php_sessions
php_sessions_old; mkdir php_sessions; echo 'juicy
session data here' >
php_sessions/sess_g35g5g54gg45wg85" and create my own
sessions, assuming I know what data needs to be in the
session file.

This may protect you from casual shell users, but what
about malicious PHP scripts, or other sites in a
virtual hosting environment?

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail!
http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/



Relevant Pages

  • Re: register_globals - turning on
    ... >>default because of the history of PHP. ... >Sessions contain persistent data, ... >>paths are a tad confusing as well. ... >In the case of session data, the web server needs to be able ...
    (comp.lang.php)
  • Session Variables Disappear and Reappear
    ... New to PHP and I've checked previous posts and haven't seen similar problem. ... I can also destroy sessions. ... message will disappear showing the "Please Login Form". ...
    (php.general)
  • Re: register_globals - turning on
    ... >>an Apache module. ... >So basically using the .htaccess is a safe way of enabling sessions to ... >>Stick this file on the beginning of every PHP page processed. ... >>In the case of session data, the web server needs to be able ...
    (comp.lang.php)
  • RE: [PHP] Clearing POST variable on page refresh
    ... [PHP] Clearing POST variable on page refresh ... Since you don't want to use sessions, ... Less than a week on an ultra busy server. ... This is most likely not a php thing, but would there be a way to refresh the ...
    (php.general)
  • Re: PHP 5 & OO
    ... And say my project has good 70 objects, some of them very large, and a 1000 users concurently browsing. ... So in theory every time a user loads a page I have to load some or all of those? ... PHP application had thousands of concurrent users? ... And you want to access other peoples sessions from within your code? ...
    (comp.lang.php)

Loading