phpinfo() doesn't play nicely with strict CSPs
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Description
Description
The output generated by phpinfo() includes inline styles and data: URLs for two images. While this is self-contained, it's incompatible with Content-Security-Policy headers that are configured securely, specifically, if your CSP doesn't include 'unsafe-inline' for style-src and data: for img-src, the output looks bad:
Two of the 6 locations in the output (i.e. not many) that uses inline styles:
<tr>
<td class="e">highlight.comment</td>
<td class="v">
<span style="color: #FF8000">#FF8000</span>
</td>
<td class="v">
<span style="color: #FF8000">#FF8000</span>
</td>
</tr>
styling like this would need to be turned into classes, though as you can see this output already makes use of classes, so this is trivial to fix.
A good way to resolve this would be to extend phpinfo so that it can serve these resources separately depending on the request context, so for example a request that contains a request param like phpinfo=styles could serve the style sheet, and phpinfo=logo could serve a logo image.
This approach would be compatible with a super-strict CSP like this (in fact there's nothing preventing phpinfo from generating this header itself):
Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'none'; image-src 'self'; style-src 'self';
The downside of this approach is that it would end up making multiple requests to serve the same page content. I don't know if there is a way that the existing approach could be preserved while allowing for this more secure approach as well.
An alternative would be for the page to generate CSP nonces or SRI hashes for the data and style elements. That's probably more complicated, though it would allow the page to remain self-contained.
Since phpinfo is a development feature, it's not very important to fix this, but it's an easy opportunity to encourage secure development practices while also making the generated page immune to injections.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at the phpinfo() entry point and trace how its HTML, inline styles, and data: image URLs are generated. Compare the possible resource-serving and nonce or hash approaches against the strict CSP described in the issue. Done means the generated page renders correctly without unsafe-inline or data: allowances.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- c, php
- Domain
- backend, security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100