Add the following list of lines into .htaccess file or to vhost configuration file appropriate to the folder within the website <Directory /securedata> Order Deny,Allow Deny from all </Directory> Same will be the case for denying files within directories <Files ~ "\.ini$"> Order allow,deny Deny from all </Files> The above lines of code will be helpful for us to prevent .svn files, .ini files, .htaccess files, include files from display within Apache

Whitelist validation refers to data validation techniques such as checking the data type, data length, input range, nature of data by its format (for e.g. phone number will be ten digits separated by hyphens satisfying the format nnn-nnn-nnnn). Regular expressions may be used for format validation in inputs. Blacklist validation refers to rejecting data based on a know bad list filter. This is not a powerful solution as the list of possible exclusions will be many and it is difficult to implement all possible scenarios. Blacklist validation should be used in conjunction with whitelist validation but in cases where whitelist validation cannot be applied at least blacklist validation should be implemented.

Dynamic SQL (concatenated sql string) is a coding practice where by the queries are built in the program and sent to SQL Server for execution. This can allow the code to be injected into the dynamic queries causing a damage to the database. A good alternative is to use parameterised queries where placeholders are set for the variables. The possibility of queries getting infected with injected code is completely removed with parameterized queries. In addition to parameterized queries, it is alway a best practice to sanitize the input parameters before using them in queries. Also the data input should be encoded appropriately especially in case of dynamic sql usage and to apply appropriate encoding when extracted from the database to avoid cross-site script execution.

Follow the simple steps given below to integrate Zend framework with other applications like Wordpress, Joomla and other such open source or custom web applications. i) Setup your Zend framework application as usual. ii) Set the document root of the Zend application to the public folder within Zend install iii) Now setup a folder for your wordpress or joomla or custom application. Let us assume that we want to create a custom blog application. Create a folder "blog" within "public" folder. Inside blog folder, create two files - .htaccess and index.php. Code for the two files are given below (more…)

XDebug provides a lot of useful information to a PHP programmer to debug code thus saving time and increasing efficiency. As a first step, check the version of PHP you are running by creating phpinfo() in a file. When the program is executed you will see a line of text showing the version of PHP you are using This program makes use of the Zend Scripting Language Engine: Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies Now that we know the version of PHP we are using, we can download the relevant xdebug version to to debug PHP programs with Notepad++ We will setup Notepad++ with xdebug and dbgp plugin. (more…)

First, download the Zend framework and unzip the file contents to a location. At the time of the writing ZendFramework-1.11.12 was in use and we have used that version in this example. Key content of the download is the /library folder which has Zend libraries in it. Then, go to the "conf" folder that was created when the site was created. Inside the conf folder, create a new file and name it vhost.conf Add the below contents to vhost.conf and save it. (more…)