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 Maybe my policy was a good idea, years ago, but now it’s just out of date.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?
I’m a full time senior PHP/JS developer.
PHP has a bad rap because of a few factors.
1, as you said, it’s accessible. It’s a very easy language to learn with a simple syntax and a simple tool chain. So often, it’s a dev’s first language. PHP holds your hand a little bit, but for the most part, security is on the developer, and when a dev doesn’t know any better, bad practices like interpolating values directly into your sql query seem like an easy way to get the job done, but at the hidden cost of opening up SQL injection vulnerabilities. But I’ve seen the same thing happen in Python code, so that’s not really a PHP problem so much as an education problem.
2, earlier versions of PHP were, in a word, shit. They were rife with inconsistencies, poor structure, half-baked features, and it all ran like dogshit. Even today, there’s still some contention in the PHP world about whether to fix the inconsistencies or not, because so much legacy code would fall apart if they did. PHP <= 4 was a goddamned dumpster fire. 5 was MARGINALLY better and brought in proper OOP. 6 literally didn’t exist for various reasons. 7 was actually getting pretty good, now with optional static typing. 8 is BANGIN’. It’s fast, easy to work with, has a great feature set, and a huge community.
3, it’s a big player. When you’re a huge player, you’re also a huge target. Wordpress is one of the most prolific web apps in existence, and it’s PHP based. Being huge, many more people are writing (shit) code for it, and many more (shit) people are trying to break it. Of course software that’s run on more servers is gonna be attacked more. It’s just numbers.
TBH, today, working in both languages extensively, I’d gladly take a PHP based web app over a NodeJS based web app. Don’t get me wrong, I love node for what it is and the paycheck I get, but JS is a goddamned dumpster fire of a half-baked language.
So tldr, don’t fear the PHP. As long as your software was written by somebody who knows their aaS from a hole in the ground, you’ll be fine.
Lol, I really appreciate your thoughts! These are exactly the sort of insights I came here for. I hope this is useful to others too who may be wondering about the same thing.
Security flaws are on the programmer, not the programming language. PHP is easy to learn and has many built in functions useful for web developing, but if the programmer doesn’t know anything about security and ships trash code it’s only his fault, this is why Laravel is so popular
I don’t think programming language is a good metric for security. I assume everything I host has issues, and then try to mitigate from there.
IMHO, a better approach is to vet the project beforehand, looking at whether it is still actively maintained. I usually use things like commits, issues, etc to try and gauge whether a piece of software is actively maintained so that when an issue arises, it can be fixed.
You can mitigate much of the risk by using some basic best practices, like isolating all apps from each other (using docker, for example), using a reverse proxy, tools like fail2ban or a web application firewall, using proper database permissions for each app, etc
What I also do is add another layer by making certain applications accessible only over vpn. That won’t work for some tools, obviously, but also reduces the risk for tools you are only using yourself.
That all seems prudent and reasonable. I guess some of my own anxiety is about how exactly I’ll evaluate projects like you’re talking about. I can (and do) certainly look at whether a project is actively developed before selecting it. Not just for security reasons… I don’t want to bet on a horse that won’t get updated with fixes and features. But for security in particular, I guess I was hoping for ways to evaluate that for a project… without exhaustively poring over its source. Maybe, to your point, the other mitigations you listed should be sufficient, and I should worry more about that side of things than picking the perfect project.
Being worried about software written in PHP is like being worried about buildings built with Ryobi tools.
I’m not sure that analogy quite holds (it’s not like the Ryobi tools are left connected to the building as a critical component of the HVAC system or something), but I like the image anyway. :D
Is what you host publicly accesible? If not, then it’s not even a concern. You could even host unsafe apps, but if you know they are entirely inaccessible, it wouldn’t change a thing.
As for php itself, it’s mostly due to the fact it’s by far and wide overwhelmingly crushing the competition. A quick Google search says it’s used by about 80% of websites. So, it has, by far, the most (negative) publicity, biggest target, and most inexperienced/bad devs working on it. Software is as secure as its made. Junior dev don’t often think about security. It’s bigger, so it happens more often.
Yeah, publicly accessible in that it’d be reachable over HTTPS from the internet (and not behind a VPN), but password-protected. Thanks for weighing in on this!