What are the potential security risks associated with executing external commands in PHP scripts?

Executing external commands in PHP scripts can pose security risks such as command injection attacks, where an attacker can manipulate input to execute malicious commands on the server. To mitigate this risk, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input before passing it to external commands. Additionally, using functions like escapeshellarg() or escapeshellcmd() can help prevent command injection vulnerabilities. 

$user_input = $_GET['input']; // Example user input from a form

$clean_input = escapeshellarg($user_input); // Escaping user input to prevent command injection

// Executing external command with sanitized input
$output = shell_exec("ls " . $clean_input);

echo $output;

Keywords

command injection security vulnerabilities escapeshellarg escapeshellcmd shell_exec

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