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Best Practice: User generated HTML cleaning

I'm coding a WYSIWYG editor width designMode="on" on a iframe. The editor works fine and i store the code as is in the database.

Before outputing the html i need to "clean" with php on the server-side to avoid cross-site-scripting and other scary things. Is there some sort of best practice on how to do this? What tags can be dangerous?

UPDATE: Typo fixed, it's What You See Is What You Get. Nothing new :)

Solution

  • The best practice is to allow only certain things you know aren't dangerous, and remove/escape all the rest. See the paper Automated Malicious Code Detection and Removal on the Web (OWASP AntiSamy) for a discussion on this (the library is for Java, but the principles apply for any language).