I know, I know, title is quite bad, but I'll try to explain what I mean here. So, I ask my members to show their photos. They upload it somewhere, then paste their photos' URL into input and I save it to my database (MYSQL). Then, the photo is being seen on their profiles. I get the URL from database and do something like that: <img src="<?=$photo;?>" height="123px" width="123px">"> where $photo is URL taken from MYSQL. Is it totally safe? Can somebody upload for example .php file and harm my website? Do I need to check if URL's ending is .gif, .png, .jpg?
Thank you.
Edit: Yeah, of course I would protect my website from SQL injections and XSS attacks. But is there any way to harm my website in other way?
Source: Tips4all
What you described may be vulnerable to an XSS (Cross-site Scripting) attack. Essentially, a nefarious user may be able to inject javascript code that could do bad things, while executing as your site.
ReplyDeleteFor an example of this attack vector, check out: http://jarlsberg.appspot.com/part2#2__stored_xss_via_html_attribute
EDIT: It sounds like you are already protecting yourself agains SQL injections and XSS, and you are wondering if there is some way for someone to inject PHP code into your site. I don't think this is possible, since your server-side code will not be executing this string. You are simply instructing the client browser to download an image from a URL.
It may be possible for someone to link to an image file that is infected with a virus, which would then infect other visitors to your site, but it would not affect the site itself.
No, it's not safe at all, XSS attacks can be executed through image tags.
ReplyDeleteA simple example would be:
<IMG SRC=jAvascript:alert('test2')>
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-site_Scripting_%28XSS%29
One thing you should consider - I could link you my "XUltra highres" image with about 200 megs. I guess this could break the loading experience of your site (depending on the design).
ReplyDeleteSo beside "script attacks" is allowing users to link content into your site always problematic.
A couple of things to do are to validate that it is a real image in an accepted format (tpyically jpg,png and gif), and sanitize and change the filename.
ReplyDeleteYou can use the PHP getimagesize function to check if it's a valid picture, and which format. You receive the alleged MIME type when the file is uploaded, but that is useless for validation. So, the following should work as the getimagesize function also validates images and returns the exif type.
$image_info=getimagesize($tempname);
$allowed_types=array(IMAGETYPE_PNG,IMAGETYPE_JPEG,IMAGETYPE_GIF);//these are actually the integers 1, 2 and 3
if(in_array($image_info[2],$allowed_types)){
//image is a valid image. You can also check the height and width.
}
In your upload processing, giving your file a new unique name that you have chosen is a good idea, and then you don't have to worry about them doing anything strange with the filename.
Edit:
I noticed you are referring to users supplying a URL to an image.
The answer I gave related to accepting, storing and displaying images users upload to your server.
The same principles apply, though, for displaying a URL of an image. You can get the image via cURL or fopen, save it to a temp file, and then check if it's really an image as described above. This can also catch the user linking to a non-existant or invalid image, so you could warn them. Also, enforce a filesize/dimension limit - you don't want someone linking to a 5 GB picture in their profile (though it would be their own bandwidth problem) as that could inconvenience your other users. The user could always change the file to something else later on, though. You could check once every x hours and warn people who are doing something suspicious, but that seems like a lot of effort on your end.
You can also enforce file name rules, say no unicode in file names, and the name must not include <>''""# -, which are characters that are rarely in legitimate image URLs.
Before inserting into the db, use imagemagik to validate that the photo is a real image, not something else, and you should be OK.
ReplyDeleteIf you allow users to specify any URL as a profile image, an attacker could exploit that to facilitate a denial of service attack against a smaller website. Its impact to the targeted website is equivalent to being slashdotted. For example, an attacker could change his/her profile picture URL to a large resource hosted on the targeted website. Each time a visitor to your site sees the attacker's profile, the targeted website wastes bandwidth serving the resource to the visitor.
ReplyDeleteA solution to this would be to only allow profile picture URLs that link to image hosting sites.
There's no point in checking the file extension, as that doesn't guarantee it's not processed by a script. GET requests (as used by img src) should be safe, and should not cause a major state change (e.g. purchase, delete user, etc.). However, there are buggy sites that do so.
ReplyDeleteThus, the safest solution is to require users to upload the image to your site. If you do allow remote images, you should at least require the http or https scheme.
Besides what the others have said regarding nefarious intentions, the only other issue I can see is if the image is of something really horrible, but then that can happen on any website where you can upload images.
ReplyDeleteIf you actually allow the users to upload images, you can check the mime type (PHP's getimagesize() function can give you this information). This is not bulletproof either, but better than just checking the extension.
You could use a regular expression to filter the url in the PHP. That way you could prevent javascript tags being called and specify the valid file extensions.
ReplyDelete