Re: [PHP] Looking for a reasonable explanation as to why $_REQUEST exists

On 7/7/08, Eric Butera <eric.butera@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Laziness/convenience.

I always get my data from the exact source I want. If someone chooses
to use REQUEST it shouldn't break their application. You say it is a
security risk, but not really. As long as everything is
filtered/escaped properly it should be fine because you force the data
to play by your rules.

I'm not talking about escaping/filtering. I'm talking about variable overriding.

In the past, it was

$_GET['foo']
$foo

register_globals fixed that.

however, if your app is relying on

$_SESSION['username'] or $_COOKIE['username'] or something like that,
depending on the variables order, it can be overridden.

I don't see why if you -know- you need $_COOKIE['username'] someone
would be lazy and use $_REQUEST['username']

It winds up allowing the end user to override information themselves
(again, depending on the variables order) which depending on that and
how poor the code is (which to me if you're relying on $_REQUEST
you've probably got some bugs and exploitable holes in there) creates
a security risk.

and session vars are in $_REQUEST, I tried it to sanity check myself
before posting this :)
.

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