transpar3nt wrote:
Quote:
Hello all, first time poster, long time reader. I have been studying
PHP and web development for a while now but have never taken on a paid
project with it until now. I have been asked by a dermatology clinic
to redesign their website with a portion that allows the patient to
create an account with the site and enter their personal information
so it is ready for the doctors to access when the patient arrives for
a check up.
>
My concern is that this requires some pretty sensitive information
being submitted and stored in our database. We plan to use SSL for
that whole segment of the site and MD5'd passwords and salted
encryption for the data, but I was wondering if you guys had any
suggestions on how I may take security to the next level with the
resources at hand (PHP/MySQL back-end, Network Solutions is the host).
Speaking of NS, the doctors asked that I cut cost as best I can and NS
has a free shared SSL cert. available that would just use a different
URL (under their fixed IP domain).. would that be a viable low-cost
solution or is there a security concern with a shared certificate?
>
My last question is about PDF. When the customer enters their patient
history, etc. into the site the doctors would like it to generate a
PDF file with all their info so all the patient has to do is print it
out and bring it in all nice and pretty. I know full well how to pull
that off with ColdFusion, but I was hoping there would be an easy
solution with PHP to do the same thing. All I can find so far is very
in-depth and complex work-arounds.
>
Thanks for any help that you may provide!!!
>
- Keith
casperghosty at gmail , com
Hi Keith,
I'd recommend you separate the user side and the admin side as much as
possible. Create separate DB users for your client facing pages and your
admin pages and lock down the permissions, maybe make the sensitive data
table write only to the client facing user.
Also you can have the admin pages accessed from a different domain name
with HHTP Auth and your own authorization scheme, maybe tied to IP if
you want to get really serious. If it's not too inconvenient for your
client you could also put all you admin pages outside the webroot and
have them access them via SSH.
Naturally make sure to protect your scripts from XSS and SQL injection.
If you want to demonstrate due diligence it might be a good idea to
write a test script that tries to access critical files / folders /
scripts, maybe including a few of the more common tricks and run it
every time you make mods to the site just to make sure you haven't
broken any security / opened any holes.
Lastly if it's very critical stuff consider not keeping it on the server
at all. You could come upwith a schem where you have their details on
file and they just use a username/patient number on the website.
Alternatively you can encrypt sensitive data with GPG and e-mail it to
the surgery. With the right thunderbird plugin the encryption would be
transparent to them.
Hope some of this helps :-)
Roger.
