Re: [PHP] Email security

[Eric Butera]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Tiji varghesetij...@yahoo.co.in wrote:
 Hello,

 I've implemented a contact form on my website that would email me the 
 contents of the form and also add it to the database. Its working perfectly 
 but I'm not too sure about the security part. I don't know much about the 
 security issues concerned with email forms and the measures to check it. 
 Please help.

 Thanks,
 Tiji



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The main thing to be aware of would be 'email header injection.'  Do
not allow returns/newlines in any of the mail header fields you
populate from user input.  Also require a valid email address and
verify that it has a valid domain name.

Next up would just be the annoyance of a client receiving tons of spam
messages.  There are a lot of automated programs crawling the web just
filling out every form it finds looking for vulns to exploit.  Even if
your form has no holes in it, the client will still get all of this
unwanted junk from the automated tests.  You can try to come up with
some clever ways of stopping that.

-- 
http://www.ericbutera.us/

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RE: [PHP] Email security

[Dewey Williams]

 -Original Message-
 From: Tiji varghese [mailto:tij...@yahoo.co.in]
 Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2009 7:47 AM
 To: PHP General
 Subject: [PHP] Email security

 Hello,

 I've implemented a contact form on my website that would email me the
 contents of the form and also add it to the database. Its working
 perfectly but I'm not too sure about the security part. I don't know
 much about the security issues concerned with email forms and the
 measures to check it. Please help.

 Thanks,
 Tiji

[Dewey Williams]

There are a number of easy to use sanitizing scripts available for 
processing forms for email and database use - find and use one! Forms 
are notoriously easy to compromise for sending spam and corrupting web 
sites.


A program I have used in the past is FormMail by 
http://www.tectite.com.  There are many other FormMail programs 
available by the same name - this one is well documented and easy to set 
up.  It doesn't provide as much database security as you may want, but 
it does a good job of hiding email and preventing cross-site scripting 
attacks.


Dewey Williams


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