this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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26
PHP and security (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by witten to c/selfhosted
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The recent post about what people are using for webmail got me thinking about a perhaps irrational policy I have with my own self-hosted software: I don't install anything written in PHP, because I have this vague notion that PHP software is often insecure. I think I probably got this idea because years ago I saw all the vulnerabilities in PHP webmail clients and PHP software like Wordpress and decided that it was the language's fault—or at least a contributing factor.

Maybe this isn't fair. Maybe PHP is just more accessible to new devs and so they're more likely to gravitate to it and make security mistakes. Maybe my perception isn't even accurate, and webmail / blog software written in other languages is just as bad—but PHP gets all the the negative attention because it's so prevalent for web apps. Maybe my policy was a good idea, years ago, but now it's just out of date.

To be clear, I'm not trying to stoke the flames of a language holy war here or anything. I'm honestly asking: Is it maybe time to revisit my anti-PHP policy? I'm looking longingly at some federated software like Pixelfed and wondering if maybe I'm just being a little too close-minded.

So I'm interested in your own experiences and polices here. Where do you draw the security line for what you will or won't host, and what made you make that choice?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bad applications full of security flaws can be written in basically every language.

The thing with PHP is there's still extremely old apps that just haven't been updated to modern standards, because PHP itself is much older and thus predates more modern JavaScript/Ruby/Python apps. Wordpress in particular hasn't changed all that much, and insists on using a wildly outdated database layer on the name of remaining compatible with old plugins, because those plugins is what people turn to Wordpress for.

As with any app you don't completely trust, the solution is to restrict what they can do as much as possible. Run with minimum privileges, sandbox it in a container, whatever is needed.

[–] witten 2 points 1 year ago

That makes sense. Maybe then the trick is to look at whether any particular app (PHP or otherwise) is written with modern security practices. How do you judge a project's security practices though?

And then, yeah, maybe also lock it down in a container so the blast radius of any actual exploit is pretty minimal.