htmlspecialchars vs htmlentities when concerned with XSS

Question

I have seen a lot of conflicting answers about this. Many people love to quote that php functions alone will not protect you from xss.

What XSS exactly can make it t

Answer 1

If PHP's header command is used to set the charset

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

then htmlspecialchars and htmlentities should both be safe for output of HTML because XSS cannot then be achieved using UTF-7 encodings.

Please note that these functions should not be used for output of values into JavaScript or CSS, because it would be possible to enter characters that enable the JavaScript or CSS to be escaped and put your site at risk. Please see the XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet on how to appropriately handle these situations.

Answer 2

htmlspecialchars() will NOT protect you against UTF-7 XSS exploits, that still plague Internet Explorer, even in IE 9: http://securethoughts.com/2009/05/exploiting-ie8-utf-7-xss-vulnerability-using-local-redirection/

For instance:

<?php
$_GET['password'] = 'asdf&ffffffffd"fancy˝quotes˝';

echo htmlspecialchars($_GET['password'], ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, 'UTF-8') . "\n";
// Output: asdf&amp;ffffffffd&quot;fancyË

echo htmlentities($_GET['password'], ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, 'UTF-8') . "\n";
// Output: asdf&amp;ffffffffd&quot;fancy&Euml;quotes

You should always use htmlentities and very rarely use htmlspecialchars when sanitizing user input. ALso, you should always strip tags before. And for really important and secure sites, you should NEVER trust strip_tags(). Use HTMLPurifier for PHP.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if you have found the answer you were looking for, but, I am also looking for an HTML cleaner. I have an application I am building and want to be able to take HTML code, possibly even Javascript, or other languages and put them into a MySQL DB without causing issues nor allowing for XSS issues. I've found HTML Purifier and it appears to be the most developed and still maintained tool for cleaning up user submitted information on a PHP system. The page linked is their compairison page which can yield reasoning as to why their's or another tool could be useful. Hope this helps!