Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by reidjs 944 days ago
What should we use for more security?
1 comments

Basically anything where it's difficult to treat variable values as code. Python, Ruby, Java, and even PHP are much better at this.
I have flashbacks of when my PHP teacher showed us how to turn query parameters into their own variables by using PHP's dynamic variables feature.

He waited a bit, and promptly said to never do that and started to explain the security risks.

Perl is probably worthy of a mention there, with it's taint-mode you're explicitly forced to test externally-influenced variables before using them.
I've seen `eval()` in production code of several applications. The biggest vulnerability is more often than not the programmer :)
But `eval()` does not violate a programmer's intuition as easily as an arithmetic expression resulting in code execution.