DZone.com: Hardening PHP: How to securely include remote code (part 1)

On the PHP on Windows blog from DZone.com Krzysztof Kotowicz has a new post - part one in a series on securing your PHP application - a look at securely including remote code from a source outside of your application.

First post of the series discussing various methods of including remote PHP code in your application - from security standpoint. In this post we discuss the history of remote code execution vulnerabilities in PHP apps and ways to prevent them. We finish off by presenting an unsecure method of including a remote code and describe what is the problem with that method.

He looks at the insecurity of a standard include/require, the allow_url_include php.ini setting and the issues with using hardcoded locations (like incorrect DNS records pointing to the wrong host).