17 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
17 lines
1.3 KiB
Markdown
# Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Security
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*This page is not comprehensive and should not be considered a complete guide to XSS prevention.*
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The first step to preventing [XSS](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Site_Scripting) attacks is knowing when you need to protect yourself. XSS can only be triggered when it is displayed within HTML content, sometimes via a form input or being displayed from database results. Any global variable that contains client information can be tainted. This includes `$_GET`, `$_POST`, and `$_COOKIE` data.
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## Prevention
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There are a few simple rules to follow to guard your application HTML against XSS. If you do not want HTML in a variable, use [strip_tags](http://php.net/strip_tags) to remove all unwanted HTML tags from a value.
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[!!] If you allow users to submit HTML to your application, it is highly recommended to use an HTML cleaning tool such as [HTML Purifier](http://htmlpurifier.org/) or [HTML Tidy](http://php.net/tidy).
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The second is to always escape data when inserting into HTML. The [HTML] class provides generators for many common tags, including script and stylesheet links, anchors, images, and email (mailto) links. Any untrusted content should be escaped using [HTML::chars].
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## References
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* [OWASP XSS Cheat Sheet](http://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet) |