The first rule of writing secure web applications is to never trust your input. If your code assumes that the value of a particular parameter is in a particular format then you should use a regex or similar to confirm/enforce that assumption. There are plenty of other potentially dangerous operations apart from those you list. Enabling Perl's taint mode forces the programmer to think more about what input they should accept and what operations are potentially dangerous.

Having said that, the subroutine you supply does not confirm that input matches expectations. Instead, it looks for some bizarre literal sequence of characters and removes them if they're there. This would do absolutely nothing to achieve the stated purpose of ensuring that "nobody can crack the box through his scripts".


In reply to Re: Security? by grantm
in thread Security? by antirice

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.