PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce solution. With more than 270,000 running instances it is one of the top 10 most used content management systems in the Web¹. Additionally to the classical software download, PrestaShop Ready offers to rent an online shop and to get administrative access to pre-hosted PrestaShop instances. From the perspective of attackers these e-commerce systems are very attractive targets because thousands of customers enter sensitive payment information.

Our leading security analysis solution RIPS detected a highly critical PHP object injection vulnerability in PrestaShop that allows to execute arbitrary code on any installation with version <= 1.7.2.4. In this technical blog post we present the vulnerability and the exploitation technique that could have allowed attackers to compromise PrestaShop servers. This posed a serious risk for the PrestaShop Ready cloud. A fix was released and administrators of outdated PrestaShop installations are highly encouraged to update.

One year ago we released version 2.0.0 of our superior PHP security analysis solution RIPS. Since then, monthly update releases for our user interface, REST API, and static analysis engine pushed our product, altogether with many new integration plugins and supported industry standards. Today, our user interface enables a highly modern and performant audit experience and our awarded code analysis engine detects unknown bugs in real applications as precise and complete as possible. To further aid developers on their mission to secure PHP code, we are excited to announce the support of the detection of over 30 new types of code quality bugs with RIPS!

LimeSurvey is an open source and commercial web application written in PHP that enables its users to quickly design and setup scalable surveys. Last year, we scanned the at that time latest version 2.72.3 with our static code analysis tool RIPS. In this technical post we will discuss and present two of the automatically detected vulnerabilities in 1MLOC: An unauthenticated persistent cross-site scripting vulnerability in the continue later feature and an authenticated arbitrary file write vulnerability. Both vulnerabilities can be chained by an attacker in order to execute code on the targeted web server with only one payload.

Zend Server is the ultimate and most secure software platform for deploying, monitoring, debugging, maintaining, and optimizing enterprise PHP applications. It also helps to keep the technology stack up-to-date and to avoid security risks that stem from outdated components. However, most of the daily web attacks try to exploit security bugs in the applications’ source code. Popular vulnerability types such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting can enable attackers to steal sensitive user data from the server. The attack surface is further increased by a variety of PHP-specific security pitfalls. A single successful breach puts a company’s reputation and compliance at danger.

Today, fully automated application security testing is an important part within every secure development life cycle. RIPS leading code analysis solution for the detection of security issues comes with an extensive API that can be used to automate its analysis features. Based on our RESTful API, we built a command line interface (CLI) tool.

In this blog post we will demonstrate how to use the RIPS CLI tool to automatically scan a project for security vulnerabilities. This enables you to integrate RIPS into basically any system as a security gate that automatically warns you when new security bugs were introduced.