Call me naive, but I never considered Perl's taint mode to be very important for programming secure web applications.

I use it for my CGI scripts, but so far I don't think it ever prevented any malicious actions.

That's probably because my scripts don't work much with the file system, but instead they access a database. (If they do access the file system, it's always with a white listing approach). With DBI's placeholders there's no malicious value an intruder might enter to compromise the database.

For output I use HTML::Template::Compiled with the default_escape => 'HTML' option, so even for "malicious" values (containing HTML meta characters) I don't any HTML injected.

So the "classical" security bugs don't really threaten my CGI scripts - it's more a possible forgotten authentication check or so (or maybe XSRF) that might threaten them - but for those taint mode doesn't really buy me anything at all.

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

In reply to Re: Could we get a more systematic approach to security in perl? by moritz
in thread Could we get a more systematic approach to security in perl? by SilasTheMonk

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