CORE GRASP for PHP is a web-application protection software aimed at detecting and blocking injection vulnerabilities and privacy violations.
As mentioned during its presentation at Black Hat USA 2007, GRASP is being released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license and can be obtained from http://grasp.coresecurity.com/.

The present implementation protects PHP 5.2.3 against SQL-injection attacks for the MySQL engine, it can be installed with almost the same effort as the PHP engine, both in Unix and Windows systems, and protection is immediate with any PHP web application running in the protected server.

CORE GRASP works by enhancing the PHP execution engine (VM) to permit byte-level taint tracking and analysis for all the user-controlled or otherwise untrustable variables of the web application. Tainted bytes are then tracked and their taint marks propagated throughout the web application’s runtime. Whenever the web application tries to interact with an DB backend using SQL statements that contain tainted bytes, GRASP analyzes the statement and detects and prevents attacks or abnormal actions.

Well, the first PHP IDS / IPS security tool was released just a couple of months ago. Slowly but steady the protection is moving away from the secure coding of the application into additional, external security layers. Is this such a good thing ?

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