How to Develop Secured PHP Application

PHP is considered to be the best scripting language for web applications development. It is used by many software companies all over the world and as a result of which we can see thousands of websites emerging every month. Sometimes these websites are prone to hacking as a result some of the important customer data will be lost. So it is very important to develop websites which is not only good looking but also which has got high security. A website is considered to be a good website when it is very difficult to break the code by the people outside the environment. It is very easy to learn PHP when a person knows the basics of Perl or C which is a basic level programming language.

Developing a static website is very simple but developing a dynamic website is not an easy job. Generally dynamic websites will have flow of data in and outside the database. It is very important for the php web developer of the application to keep track of these activities and provide high security for the data such that third party cannot break the code and fetch the information. Generally for developing dynamic websites using PHP, MySQL is used as the database system.

It is a very bad habit to write a query with hardcoded values. If the query is like “Select * from Table Name Where column = 1” then it is very easy to hack the data. In this you can see the number which has been hardcoded and it makes easy job for the hacking activities by providing different number to fetch the important data. It is highly recommended to make use of Type Casting and inbuilt functions like intval() or addslashes() which will keep the data as private property. The process of hacking the data by providing queries is called SQL injection.

Most of the websites will make of use of sessions and cookies for providing the customers with different roles to make their transactions without any breakage. When the script writes these session and cookie values for a document without filtering then hackers can reach out these data very easily. It is recommended to use of function called as htmlspecialchars(). This process of scripting is called as cross site scripting.

The other most common hacking process is PHP injection where hackers will make use of Eval function to execute the PHP code directly. So while making use of eval() function for development it is required to choose the string.