by calvinmorrison 7 hours ago
That's a nice find. People rely a little heavily on this, and it only says in the manual "This directive allows certain functions to be disabled." but its not a security sandbox.
I think PHP has in the past explicitly stated its not a security feature.
There have been a few issues over the years with this.
Anyway - good OS security is required anytime you run software!
heres one from 6 years ago https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=76047
> I think PHP has in the past explicitly stated its not a security feature.
I'm struggling to think what it's for then?
likely intended more as a lint than a security feature, it's not unusual to want to exclude commonly misused features from your code and any libraries you use.
Knowing the mess that is the php standard library, I imagine many applications would want to just straight up ban the really bad parts.
> I'm struggling to think what it's for then?
Placating some users - mainly shared web hosting providers - who still think that disabling functions like system() and exec() is an effective security measure.
a lazy security feature that stops 90% of problems?