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Is there a catchall function somewhere that works well for sanitizing user input for SQL injection and XSS attacks, while still allowing certain types of HTML tags?
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Sanitizing data means removing any illegal character from the data. Sanitizing user input is one of the most common tasks in a web application. To make this task easier PHP provides native filter extension that you can use to sanitize the data such as e-mail addresses, URLs, IP addresses, etc.
You can use the filter extension, which provides a comprehensive way to sanitize user input. the below code will remove all HTML tags from a string: $string = "<h1>Hello, World! </h1>"; $new_string = filter_var($string, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING); // $new_string is now "Hello, World!"
User input should always be treated as malicious before making it down into lower layers of your application. Always handle sanitizing input as soon as possible and should not for any reason be stored in your database before checking for malicious intent.
It's a common misconception that user input can be filtered. PHP even has a (now deprecated) "feature", called magic-quotes, that builds on this idea. It's nonsense. Forget about filtering (or cleaning, or whatever people call it).
What you should do, to avoid problems, is quite simple: whenever you embed a a piece of data within a foreign code, you must treat it according to the formatting rules of that code. But you must understand that such rules could be too complicated to try to follow them all manually. For example, in SQL, rules for strings, numbers and identifiers are all different. For your convenience, in most cases there is a dedicated tool for such an embedding. For example, when you need to use a PHP variable in the SQL query, you have to use a prepared statement, that will take care of all the proper formatting/treatment.
Another example is HTML: If you embed strings within HTML markup, you must escape it with htmlspecialchars. This means that every single echo or print statement should use htmlspecialchars.
A third example could be shell commands: If you are going to embed strings (such as arguments) to external commands, and call them with exec, then you must use escapeshellcmd and escapeshellarg.
Also, a very compelling example is JSON. The rules are so numerous and complicated that you would never be able to follow them all manually. That's why you should never ever create a JSON string manually, but always use a dedicated function, json_encode() that will correctly format every bit of data.
And so on and so forth ...
The only case where you need to actively filter data, is if you're accepting preformatted input. For example, if you let your users post HTML markup, that you plan to display on the site. However, you should be wise to avoid this at all cost, since no matter how well you filter it, it will always be a potential security hole.
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Do not try to prevent SQL injection by sanitizing input data.
Instead, do not allow data to be used in creating your SQL code. Use Prepared Statements (i.e. using parameters in a template query) that uses bound variables. It is the only way to be guaranteed against SQL injection.
Please see my website http://bobby-tables.com/ for more about preventing SQL injection.
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