PHP Consortium Tackles Third-Party Application Security

According to this eWeek story, an international group of coding experts including Zend Engine developer Andi Gutmans have launched an initiative to improve the security of third-party PHP applications. The group says it plans to offer programming guidelines and tools, as well as audits of PHP-based applications. Given the popularity of PHP, this sounds like a good idea. (Richard Monson-Haefel has been doing some great research for us on how and where enterprises are using the "P" scripting languages, and it's pretty amazing. We'll be publishing that report in a month or so.) Hopefully the group's efforts will lead to better programming practices, the root of many application vulnerabilities.