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In Security | Last updated: May 31, 2023

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Invicti Web Application Security Scanner – the only solution that delivers automatic
verification of vulnerabilities with Proof-Based Scanning™.

9 Best PHP Code Security Scanner to Find

Vulnerabilities
By Chandan Kumar

Find security risk and code quality in your PHP application.

PHP rules the web, with around 80% of the market share. It’s everywhere –
WordPress, Joomla, Lavarel, Drupal, etc.
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PHP core is secure, but there are a lot more on top of this, which you might be
using, and that might be vulnerable. After the development of a site or complex
web application, most of the developers and site owners focus on functionality,
design, SEO, and they forget the essential component – security.

As a best practice, you should consider performing a security scan against your
application before going live. This applies to any site – small or big. There are some
tools to help you with that.

1 PMF
PHP Malware Finder (PMF) is a self-hosted solution to help you find possible
malicious codes in the files. It is known to detect dodgy, encoders, obfuscators,
web shellcode.
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PMF leverage YARA, so you need that as a pre-requisite to run the test.

2 RIPS
RIPS is one of the popular PHP static code analysis tools to be integrated through
the development lifecycle to find security issues in real-time. You can categorize
the finding by industry compliance and standard to prioritize the fixes.

OWASP Top 10

SANS Top 25

PCI-DSS

HIPPA
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Let’s take a look at some of the following features.

Pinpoint risk based on severity and option to define weights for critical, high,
medium, and low.

Collaborate the investigation and prioritize the issue

Understand the vulnerability impact

Evaluate security risk between old and new code

Create a to-do list and assign tasks using the ticketing system

RIPS lets you export scan results report into multiple formats – PDF, CSV, and others
by using RESTful API.

It is available as a self-hosted and SaaS model. So choose what works for you.

3 SonarPHP
SonarPHP by SonarSource uses pattern matching, data flow techniques to find
vulnerabilities in PHP codes. It is a static code analyzer and integrates with Eclipse,
IntelliJ.
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SonarSource checks the code against more than 140 rules, and it also supports
custom rules written in Java.

4 Exakat
A real-time static code analyzer engine to check compliance, risk, and reinforce
best practices. Exakat got more than 450 analyzers dedicated to PHP. There are
framework-specific analyzers like WordPress, CakePHP, Zend, etc.
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If you have your PHP application code in GitHub, then you can use their public
analyzer else you can choose to download or use the cloud-based online.

With the help of Exakat, you can integrate eternal security into your application
and the following.

Code review automated with more than 100 rules

Compliance ready

Automate your code documentation

PHP 7 migration made easy

With the robust reporting, you can prioritize the remediation.

 5 PHPStan 

PHPStan is a fantastic tool to find bugs as you write the code. You don’t need to run
anything.

You can try the online version here.

PHPStan requires 7.1 or higher version and composer to use it. However, it is capable
of discovering bugs from an older version.

6 Psalm
Built on top of PHP Parser, Psalm is good to find errors and help to maintain
consistency for a better and secure application.
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7 Progpilot
Progpilot static analyzer lets you specify the analysis type like GET, POST, COOKIE,
SHELL_EXEC, etc. It supports suiteCRM and CodeIgniter framework at the moment.

8 Grabber
Grabber, a python based tool to perform hybrid analysis on a PHP-based
application using PHP-SAT.

9 Symfony
Security Monitoring by Symfony works with any PHP project using the composer. It is
a PHP security advisory database for known vulnerabilities. You can either use PHP-
CLI, Symfony-CLI, or web-based to check composer.lock for any known issues with
the libraries you are using in the project.
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Symfony also offers a security notification service. That means you can upload your
composer.lock file, and whenever in future any used libraries found to be vulnerable,
you will get notified.

Conclusion

I hope by using the above tools, you make your PHP applications more secure. All of
the listed tools focus on analyzing source code, and if you need more, then check
out an open-source security scanner.

Once your application is ready, then don’t forget to add a cloud-based WAF for
continuous security from the edge network.

Chandan Kumar
Author

Chandan Kumar is the founder of Geekflare. He’s helped millions to excel in the digital realm.
Passionate about technology, He’s on a mission to explore the world and amplify growth for
professionals and businesses.

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 PHP
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