Building secure applications with Zend Framework 2

Security is a very important aspect of web applications and is not only limited to "filter the input and escape the output". In this talk we will present the security features of Zend Framework 2 that can help PHP developers to build secure web applications. We will talk about the Authentication and Authorization component, the Escaper component and the Cryptographic component that can be used to safely store user's password and protect sensitive data using strong cryptographic algorithms like AES, Bcrypt, Scrypt, RSA, etc.
This talk was presented at ZendCon 2013 in Santa Clara (California).

Transcript

1. Building secure
   applications with ZF2
   Enrico Zimuel
   Zend Framework Team
   Zend Technologies Inc.
   

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2. 2
   About me
   • Enrico Zimuel (@ezimuel)
   • Software Engineer since 1996
   • PHP Engineer at Zend Technologies in
   the Zend Framework and Apigility Team
   • International speaker, author of books and
   technical articles
   • Researcher programmer at Informatics
   Institute of University of Amsterdam
   • Co-founder of PUG Torino (Italy)
   

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3. OWASP Top Ten Attacks 2013
   1) Injection
   2) Broken Authentication and Session Management
   3) Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
   4) Insecure direct object references
   5) Security Misconfiguration
   6) Sensitive Data Exposure
   7) Missing function level access control
   8) Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
   9) Using components with known vulnerability
   10) Unvalidated redirects and forwards
   Source: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-Top_10
   

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4. 4
   Security “mantra”
   “Filter Input, Escape Output”
   

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5. ZF2 security in a nutshell
   ●
   Organization of the code
   – 1 public folder with redirect (.htaccess) and a single
   front controller (index.php)
   – configuration files outside the public folder, using
   simple PHP arrays: *.global.php (not sensitive data),
   and *.local.php (sensitive data, not in versioning
   using .gitignore)
   ●
   Filter input
   – Validation of user's input (Zend\Validator)
   – Filtering of user's input (Zend\Form, InputFilter)
   – CAPTCHA
   

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6. ZF2 security in a nutshell (2)
   ●
   Escape output
   – Zend\Escaper for HTML, CSS and JS
   ●
   Authentication and Permissions
   – Zend\Authentication (LDAP, HTTP, etc)
   – Access Control List (ACL), Role-based access
   control (RBAC)
   ●
   Protect sensitive data (cryptography)
   – AES + HMAC as default encryption and
   authentication algorithm
   – bcrypt for password storing
   

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7. Security components in ZF2
   ●
   Zend\Authentication
   ●
   Zend\Captcha
   ●
   Zend\Crypt
   ●
   Zend\Escaper
   ●
   Zend\Filter
   ●
   Zend\InputFilter
   ●
   Zend\Permissions
   ●
   Zend\Math
   ●
   Zend\Validator
   

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8. Zend\Authentication
   

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9. 9
   Authentication
   ●
   Zend\Authentication provides API for
   authentication and includes concrete
   authentication adapters for common use
   case scenarios
   ●
   Adapters:
   – Database Table
   – Digest
   – HTTP
   – LDAP
   – Your adapter
   

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10. Example
    

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11. Zend\Permissions
    

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12. 12
    Zend\Permissions\Acl
    ●
    The component provides a lightweight and
    flexible access control list (ACL)
    implementation for privileges
    management
    ●
    Terminology:
    – a resource is an object to which access is
    controlled
    – a role is an object that may request
    access to a resource
    

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13. Example
    

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14. Zend\Escaper
    

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15. 15
    Escaper
    ●
    Escape the output, multiple
    formats:
    – escapeHtml()
    – escapeHtmlAttr()
    – escapeJs()
    – escapeUrl()
    – escapeCss()
    

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16. Zend\Crypt
    

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17. Cryptography is hard
    ●
    Cryptography is hard, and implement it is
    even more hard!
    ●
    PHP offers some crypto primitives but
    you need to know how to use it (this is
    not straightforward)
    ●
    This can be a barrier that discouraged
    PHP developers
    

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18. 18
    Cryptography using ZF2
    ●
    Zend\Crypt help PHP developers to use
    strong cryptography in their projects
    ●
    In PHP we have built-in functions and
    extensions for cryptography scopes:
    – crypt()
    – Mcrypt
    – OpenSSL
    – Hash (by default in PHP 5.1.2)
    – Mhash (emulated by Hash from PHP 5.3)
    

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19. Zend\Crypt
    ●
    Zend\Crypt components:
    – Zend\Crypt\Password
    – Zend\Crypt\Key\Derivation
    – Zend\Crypt\Symmetic
    – Zend\Crypt\PublicKey
    – Zend\Crypt\Hash
    – Zend\Crypt\Hmac
    – Zend\Crypt\BlockCipher
    

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20. How to protect
    sensitive data with
    ZF2
    

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21. 21
    Encrypt and Authenticate
    ●
    Zend\Crypt\BlockCipher can be used to
    encrypt/decrypt sensitive data (symmetric
    encryption)
    ●
    Provides encryption + authentication (HMAC)
    ●
    Simplified API:
    – setKey($key)
    – encrypt($data)
    – decrypt($data)
    ●
    It uses the Mcrypt adapter
    

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22. Default encryption algorithms
    ●
    Default values used by BlockCipher:
    – AES algorithm (key of 256 bits)
    – CBC mode + HMAC (SHA-256)
    – PKCS7 padding mode (RFC 5652)
    – PBKDF2 to generate encryption key +
    authentication key for HMAC
    – Random IV for each encryption
    

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23. 23
    Example: AES encryption
    The encrypted text is encoded in Base64, you can switch to
    binary output using setBinaryOutput(true)
    

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24. Example: encryption output
    064b05b885342dc91e7915e492715acf0f89
    6620dbf9d1e00dd0798b15e72e8cZg+hO3
    4C3f3eb8TeJM9xWQRVex1y5zeLrBsNv+d
    YeVy3SBJa+pXZbUQYNZw0xS9s
    Zend\Crypt\BlockCipher::encrypt
    “This is the message to encrypt”
    “this is the
    encryption key”
    Legend: HMAC, IV, ciphertext
    

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25. 25
    Example: decrypt
    

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26. Zend\Crypt\PublicKey
    ●
    Implements public key algorithms
    ●
    We support:
    – RSA (Zend\Crypt\PublicKey\Rsa)
    – Diffie-Hellman
    (Zend\Crypt\PublicKey\DiffieHellman),
    for key exchange
    ●
    We use the OpenSSL extension
    

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27. 27
    Example: generate the keys
    You can also generate the public and private key using
    OpenSSL from the command line (Unix style syntax):
    $ ssh-keygen -t rsa
    

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28. Example: encrypt/decrypt
    

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29. 29
    Limited size using RSA
    ●
    With a key of 2048 bit we can encrypt string with
    a maximum size of 1960 bit (245 characters)
    ●
    In most use cases the RSA encryption is used
    only to encrypt a symmetric key
    ●
    Hybrid cryptosystem:
    – the ciphertext is encrypted using a symmetric
    cipher (e.g. Zend\Crypt\BlockCipher)
    – the encrypted key is attached to the
    ciphertext, in order to be decrypted using
    the private key of the receiver
    

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30. Example: digital signature
    

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31. How to store
    a password?
    

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32. How to store a password
    ●
    How do you safely store a password?
    ●
    Old school (insecure):
    – MD5/SHA1(password)
    – MD5/SHA1(password . salt)
    where salt is a random string
    ●
    New school (secure):
    – bcrypt
    – scrypt
    

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33. 33
    Why MD5/SHA1 ±salt is not secure?
    ●
    Dictionary/brute force attacks more efficient
    ●
    GPU-accelerated password hash:
    – Whitepixel project
    whitepixel.zorinaq.com
    4 Dual HD 5970, ~ $2800
    Algorithm Speed 8 chars 9 chars 10 chars
    md5($pass) 33 billion p/s 1 ½ hour 4 ½ days 294 days
    

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34. bcrypt
    ●
    bcrypt uses Blowfish cipher + iterations to generate
    secure hash values
    ●
    bcrypt is secure against brute force attacks because
    is slow, very slow (that means attacks need huge
    amount of time to be completed)
    ●
    The algorithm needs a salt value and a work factor
    parameter (cost), which allows you to determine how
    expensive the bcrypt function will be
    

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35. 35
    Zend\Crypt\Password\Bcrypt
    ●
    We used the crypt() function of PHP to implement the
    bcrypt algorithm
    ●
    The cost is an integer value from 4 to 31
    ●
    The default value for Zend\Crypt\Password\Bcrypt is 14
    (that is equivalent to 1 second of computation using an
    Intel Core i5 CPU at 3.3 Ghz).
    ●
    The cost value depends on the CPU speed, check on
    your system! We suggest to consume at least 0.5
    second.
    

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36. Example: bcrypt
    ●
    The output of bcrypt ($hash) is a string of 60 bytes
    

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37. 37
    How to verify a password
    ●
    To check if a password is valid against an hash
    value we can use the method:
    – Bcrypt::verify($password, $hash)
    where $password is the value to check and
    $hash is the hash value generated by bcrypt
    ●
    This method returns true if the password is valid
    and false otherwise
    

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38. Thanks!
    Vote this talk at https://joind.in/9071
    

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