Tavis Ormandy is the guy from the Google Security Team who “makes it happend”.

He’s a researcher on the Google Security Team and faces the unpleasent responsibility of passing all googles products pass the security tests. Tavis is also an open-source contributer, working as a co-lead of the Gentoo Security Team as well. He is one of the faces that should make the Linux Gentoo distribution safe.

In September 2006, Tavis reported vulnerabilities in the gunzip decompressor on behalf of Google. Here is the link to the report made by Tavis: http://www.scary.beasts.org/security/tavis_gzip.txt

He has also discovered lot’s of other vulnerabilities such as PCRE (Perl Compitable Regular Expressions) and Perl Unicode Regular Expression buffer overflow. Links to these hacks can be found here: (PCRE) (UNICODE)

Summary: We should be glad of Tavis work since he’s making the web and the servers safer by contributing and telling the software creators before making the exploits public.

Here’s some collected links that can be interesting:
Tavis Ormandy’s blog
Secwatch profile
Milw0rm profile

Wondering which people that really have influence on the web, OS and overall security in the world? There are dozens of hackers and programmers that effect the security in software and websites but there are some who stand above most others.

cdsrc will cover up five of the most influental persons in the security matter, starting off with Tavis Ormandy from the Google Security team.

The article about Tavis Ormandy will be released in a couple of days.

Since PHP 5.1.2 the hash function is enabled by default. To create a sha256 hash you simply write:

hash("sha256", $data, false);

There you have your sha256 hash!

SQL injections are common nowadays and plenty of sites get hacked because of insecure database calls.

Making it bulletproof against injections is hard and will take time, but making safer calls are essential and doesn’t take that long to make.

So, what is a SQL injection?

To clearify it I will give a very easy example:

A database may look something like this:
ID | USERNAME | PASSWORD

When you make a call to that database your query can look something like this:

SELECT * FROM database_name WHERE id = '2'

So far no problems.. But when you code it, it will be something like this (the insecure way):

$sql = "SELECT * FROM database_name WHERE id = '".$_POST['id']."'";

If you make that query and has a id that is “2″, there will be no problem, but if you change it to something else, you will get some problems.

What if $_POST[’id’] would contain something like: ‘ or 1=1– ?

The query would now be:

$sql = "SELECT * FROM database_name WHERE id = '' or 1=1--";

That would automaticly select the whole database since that “or 1=1″ definetly is true.

That was a very short description of what a SQL injection is so how can we now prevent without using any PDO? Using PDO may be the most secure way but requires more knowledge too.

Three lines of code will secure your code against the most known injections and will make it a lot harder to inject your site and hack it. One of this lines will take care of XSS hacking methods too:

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$_POST = array_map("htmlspecialchars", $_POST);	# Will secure from XSS
$_POST = array_map("trim", $_POST); # Remove spaces before and after posts
$_POST = array_map("mysql_real_escape_string", $_POST); # Protects from most known SQL injections

Just add these lines in the top include file and you will always have your $_POST protected from the most known SQL injections. One easy way of securing your web applications a little further.