Building Secure PHP Apps

Do you ever wonder how vulnerable you are to being hacked?  Do you feel confident about storing your users sensitive information?

Imagine feeling confident in the integrity of your software when you store your user's sensitive data.  No more fighting fires with lost data, no more late nights, your application is secure.

In this short book I'll give you clear, actionable details on how to secure various parts of your web application.  You will also find scenarios to handle and improve existing legacy issues.

Several years ago I was writing a web application for a client in the CodeIgniter PHP framework, *shudder*, but CodeIgniter didn't include any type of authentication system built in.  I of course did what any good/lazy developer would do and went on the hunt for a well made library to supply authentication capabilities.  To my chagrin I discovered that there weren't any clean, concise libraries that fit my needs for authentication in CodeIgniter.  Thus began my journey of creating Ion Auth, a simple authentication library for CodeIgniter, and a career long crusade for securing web applications as well as helping other developers do the same.

Here we are years later, a lot of us have moved on to other frameworks or languages, but I still repeatedly see basic security being overlooked.  So let's fix that.  I want to make sure that you'll never have to live the horror of leaking user passwords, or have someone inject malicious SQL into your database, or the suite of other "hacks" that could have been easily avoided.  Let's make sure we all get home on time and sleep well at night.

Topics

I'm aiming for a short book, hopefully around 70-100 pages, that is a quick read with handbook style references to specific items you can act on.  The following sections will be covered:

• Never trust your users - escape all input
• HTTPS/SSL/BCA/JWH/SHA and other random letters, some of them actually matter
• Password Encryption and Storage for Everyone
• Authentication, Access Control, and Safe File Handing
• Safe Defaults, Cross Site Scripting and other Popular Hacks

This is a work in progress so if there are any topics you'd like more information on please let me know.

Format

I plan to release a few editions of this book, each focusing on a different programming languages.  The languages slated for eventual release are PHP, Python, Ruby, and JS.  This first edition will be in PHP.  I will offer heavily discounted copies of the future editions to customers of this book.

Progress

All of the inital writing is complete.  Four of the five chapters are finished/published/done.  The last chapter is still being edited.  Purchasing now allows you to have access to each chapter as it is completed as well as enabling you to purchase at a discounted rate.  Once the final chapter is done the price will be going up so buy now to save.