Re: Re: Why does $_REQUEST exist?

On 15.05.2009, at 19:14, Michael Shadle wrote:

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:32 AM, Lukas Kahwe Smith <mls@pooteeweet.org> wrote:

The more stuff like this we remove, the harder it becomes for people to quickly move to newer, faster and more secure versions of PHP. That causes way more frustration for everyone than a few "ugly" legacy features. If there is a decent technical reason, performance or security, then we need to take a hard look at it. In this case, the thing we should be looking at isn't whether we should remove $_REQUEST but whether we should remove cookie data from it. Many configurations already do that, including all of my own, and there is a strong valid security reason for not including cookies in $_REQUEST. Most people use $_REQUEST to mean GET or POST, not realizing that it could also contain cookies and as such bad guys could potentially do some cookie injection tricks and break naive applications.

But since there is going to be a dramatic change here anyway, this is the perfect time to do it. To me adding namespaces is a lot more scary and will lead to a lot of confusing code...

Confusing new code is totally different from breaking existing code.

Its already fixed in 5.3. There is a new ini option that defines what should go into $_REQUEST. See the following blog post for details: http://www.suspekt.org/2008/10/01/php-53-and-delayed-cross-site-request-forgerieshijacking/ Also a lot of work was put into restructuring the php.ini files we ship with PHP.

This is a good step I think; will it be possible to allow it to be empty and have $_REQUEST not exist or even be initialized? Also, you said it yourself in your blog - not caring what is done via GET and POST is bad practice. Why not enforce this in the engine?

Just FYI: Not sure which blog you are talking about, but that is Stefan Esser's blog that is linked above.

Also, I had thought $_REQUEST had included session data too. At least that is not there. Talk about easy exploitation options then! :)

Indeed, that would have been insane. regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith mls@pooteeweet.org