Mitigating XSS Attacks: Comprehensive Guide for PHP Sites
To minimize the risk of XSS attacks on your PHP website, following these best practices is crucial:
Input Handling:
- Implement input escaping consistently using a secure function like htmlentities() for all user-generated content displayed on the site.
- Utilize prepared statements with PDO or similar database abstraction layer to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Output Handling:
- Escape output for each output format, especially for HTML (htmlentities()) and JSON (json_encode() with JSON_HEX_QUOT option).
- Consider using a templating engine (e.g., Smarty) to automatically escape output.
Additional Measures:
- Disable magic quotes and register globals configurations in PHP.
- Scan your database periodically for malicious content like