According to Wappalyzer, PHP powers over twelve million websites. Not bad for a 28-year-old language! Despite its age, PHP has kept up with modern development practices. With support for type declarations and excellent frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, PHP is still a great way to develop web apps. PHP works well in containerized environments. With an official image available on Docker Hub, developers know they can access well-tested PHP container images to build on.

Developer-centric Laravel is often described as “the PHP framework for web artisans.” It’s one of the most used frameworks within the PHP ecosystem, with an extensive community and a wide array of sub-branches dedicated to application development of all kinds. With version 1.0 launched in 2011, Laravel currently powers the websites of global companies like 9GAG, BBC, and Pfizer.

Recently, researchers from Positive Security published findings identifying a major remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in dompdf, a popular PDF generation library. In their reporting, they outlined a way that code could be loaded into an application and then remotely executed during a PDF being generated. Dompdf is used quite extensively within the PHP ecosystem, and is used within over 59,000 open sourced platforms and projects.

We recently announced our beta release for PHP support in Snyk Code, which brought with it the ability to identify potential PHP security vulnerabilities at the code level. After a successful public beta program, PHP security support in Snyk Code is now GA. 🎉🎉🎉 PHP is a popular programming language that is used by developers all over the world. In this blog post, we will take a look at some of the features of Snyk Code and how it can be used with PHP.

PHP is by far the most widely used server-side programming language. Security threats surrounding PHP applications have been in the news because PHP captures over 80% of the internet with over 10 million websites built. It’s no wonder that with such a massive usage, PHP is also one of the most targeted and exploited languages, as shown in the below statistics.

When it comes to PHP, composer is without discussion, THE package manager. It’s fast, easy to use, actively maintained and very secure — or so most thought. On April 21, 2021, a command injection vulnerability was reported, which shook the PHP community. Fortunately it didn’t have a very big impact, but it could have. The problem with the vulnerability is that it affected the very heart of the Composer supply chain: Packagist servers.

Snyk Code support for PHP vulnerability scanning is now available in beta. Now security issues in PHP code can be identified quickly and easily. To get started, log into Snyk or sign up for a free account. Once logged in on the dashboard, click on the Add Project button in the top right corner and connect to a repository you want to scan.

Following on from my previous post on testing for PHP Composer security vulnerabilities, I thought this post might be useful in helping create more secure applications that prevent PHP code injection. As developers, we build apps to help make end users’ lives easier. Be it entertainment, workplace or social network application, the end goal is to protect the users we build for by ensuring we build security into the code.

PHP is used extensively to power websites. From blogging to ecommerce, it’s embedded in our everyday lives and powers much of the internet we use today. According to a Wappalyzer report on top programming languages of 2020, PHP has a 79% market share of backend languages used on the internet today. One of the biggest challenges with PHP libraries over the years has been package management. There have been a few ways to easily install and maintain libraries including PECL, CPAN.

In volume 11 of our annual State of Software Security (SOSS) report, we uncovered some valuable nuggets of information about how you, the innovative developers of our world, can craft more secure code. For example, did you know that scanning via API improves the time to remediate 50 percent of security flaws by about 17 days, or that C++ and PHP languages have an alarmingly high number of severe security flaws and need greater attention?