In this article I will show you how to slightly increase application security, by exploiting the fact that Yii implements the Front Controller Pattern.

When talking about cookie-base login the Yii guide indicates the following:

Suppose a hacker has an account of your website He could set the PHPSESSID to empty After of that He login in your system The PHPSESSID remains blank and user has already logged with this session

To extend the functionality of you web application relative to your requirements you are supposed to use existing yii core libraries or use external libraries. There are some steps to ensure security, uniqueness, modularity, performance and to avoid rework in future.

Step 01: Have a Strategy

• Is my extension just for fun/demonstration purposes or for everyday use in the real world? -...

Hello Yii friends

Getting "Expired token" errors ? Here is a solution to avoid invalid CSRF on POST or ajax requests, or user identity changes.

Update: This wiki has been rewritten to be in line with Yii 1.1.14. Since many of the detailed complexities are now handled by Yii, the article focuses on how the crypt() built-in function works and why it's important to use it correctly.

I installed phpseclib because I needed to do some AES encryption in my project. After all the hassle of installing php lib, I found out that Yii already has a security module (securityManager). I finally decided to keep using phpseclib because it has one big advantage over Yii securityManager module, it does...

This HowTo assumes that you have a smattering of ACL in general and of how the acl-extension works basically. It will introduce you into the abstract and give you a hint on how to use Business-Rules. If you have in-depth questions, please refer to the extension documentation. Using ACL in an RBAC-manner cannot and should never obs...

In this mini howto I would like to show how to add a required captcha field in the login form, after a defined number of unsuccessfull attempts. To do this, I will use the blog demo that you have in default Yii download package (path/to/yii/demos/blog).

In this article I will show you how to implement a secure password hashing mechanism in your Yii projects using a bCrypt class.

This wiki has been replaced by Use crypt() for password storage.

How to create a simple (non-RBAC) authorization system

• Validate the user input (see below for details).
• Protect (escape) your application output according to context (see below for a few output types, mostly HTML and SQL).
• Test your application in debug mode.
  Set the constant YII_DEBUG to true (by default, it is defined in index.php) and put alongside error_reporting(E_ALL);. Then errors and warnings will stop the execution an...

This article is called extended guide is because there is already a security guide in the Yii tutorial security section. but that guide is not complete in the sense that it does not rise the developers' attention to some other commonly happening attacks: SQL injection and magic URL, which can be major vulnerabilities in you...

• iteration_count_log2 controls the number of iterations for key stretching. A setting of 8 means the hash algorithm will be applied 2^⁸ = 256 times. This setting should be kept between 4 and 31.
• portable_hashes controls whether portable hashes should be used or not. Portable hashes are salted MD5 hashes prefixed by $P$.

Sometimes you need to force a user to change their password after x number of days. This article describes how to implement this using a filter, ChangePasswordFilter.

CSRF é o acrônimo para Cross-site request forgery.
CSRF é um ataque que forca o usuário a executar ações não desejadas numa aplicação Web na qual ele está autenticado.

CSRF is the acronymn for Cross-site request forgery.
It is an attack which forces an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application in which he/she is currently authenticated.

Starting with the blog tutorial, Yii developers are familiar with the notion of access rules defined in the controller, where the actions are allowed or denied depending on the user's name or role.

class CommentController extends CController {
    public function filters()
    {
        return array( 'accessControl' ); // perform access control for CRUD operations
    }