Safety First

Context-Aware Escaping

Although the Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is one of the trivial ways of exploiting a web page it is the most common vulnerability but very serious. It can lead to identity theft and so on. The best defense is consistent escaping of printed data, ie. converting the characters which have a special meaning in the given context.

If the coder omits the escaping a security hole is made. That's why template engines implement automated escaping. The problem is that the web page has different contexts and each has different rules for escaping printed data. A security hole then shows up if the wrong escaping functions are used.

But Latte is sophisticated. It features unique technology of Context-Aware Escaping which recognizes the context in which the tag is placed and chooses the right escaping mode. What does that mean?

Latte doesn't need any manual work. All is done automatically, consistently and correctly. You don't have to worry about security holes.

Lets see how it works:

<p onclick="alert({$movie})">{$movie}</p>

<script>var movie = {$movie};</script>

If $movie variable stores 'Amarcord & 8 1/2' string it generates the following output. Notice different escaping used in HTML and JavaScript and also in onclick attribute:

<p onclick="alert(&quot;Amarcord &amp; 8 1\/2&quot;)">Amarcord &amp; 8 1/2</p>

<script>var movie = "Amarcord & 8 1\/2";</script>

Thanks to Context-Aware Escaping the template is simple and your application perfectly secured against Cross-Site Scripting. You can use PHP variables natively inside the JavaScript!

Latte automatically checks whether the variable used in the src or href attributes contains a web URL (ie protocol HTTP) and prevents the writing of links that may pose a security risk.

{var $link = 'javascript:attack()'}

<a href="{$link}">click here</a>



The check can be turned off using a filter noCheck.