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The PHP serialisation format has many issues, especially since it allows all sorts of PHP data structures to be encoded. This allows defining references and ser
by johannes1234321 9y ago
The PHP serialisation format has many issues, especially since it allows all sorts of PHP data structures to be encoded. This allows defining references and serializing objects using custom routines into arbitrary binary blobs. Also PHP's unserialization can be used to trigger the autoloader as it tries to resolve unloaded classes, which can trigger unsafe routines in those.
Certainly no data format for data exchange between systems, especially untrusted sources.
- toast0 9y agoYou shouldn't use PHP's unserialize implementation with untrusted sources; but my point was that its format makes it relatively simple to parse vs json or xml where you have to do a lot of work to parse strings. If you're writing your own parser (including a parser for another language), you could decide to only parse basic types (bool, int, float, array); if you're designing your own format, you could take the lesson of length prefixed strings are much easier to use for computers than delimited strings.