CWE-473 — PHP External Variable Modification
CWE-473: PHP External Variable Modification
MITRE CWE weakness
| Kind | Weakness |
| Abstraction | Variant |
| Status | Draft |
| Likelihood of exploit | — |
Description
A PHP application does not properly protect against the modification of variables from external sources, such as query parameters or cookies. This can expose the application to numerous weaknesses that would not exist otherwise.
Common consequences
- Integrity: Modify Application Data
Mitigations
Requirements — Carefully identify which variables can be controlled or influenced by an external user, and consider adopting a naming convention to emphasize when externally modifiable variables are being used. An application should be reluctant to trust variables that have been initialized outside of its trust boundary. Ensure adequate checking is performed when relying on input from outside a trust boundary. Do not allow your application to run with register_globals enabled. If you implement a register_globals emulator, be extremely careful of variable extraction, dynamic evaluation, and similar issues, since weaknesses in your emulation could allow external variable modification to take place even without register_globals.
References
- CWE page: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/473.html
- CWE list: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/index.html