Security: Sanitize 'project' GET parameter to prevent Reflected XSS

Summary

A security analysis has identified a Reflected Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability. The application is not properly encoding user-provided data from a GET parameter before including it in the HTML response.

Vulnerability Details

• Description: The project GET parameter is directly rendered into the page's HTML without being sanitized. This allows an attacker to craft a malicious URL that injects and executes arbitrary JavaScript in the context of a victim's browser session.
• Impact: This could lead to session hijacking, data theft, or defacement of the application for the affected user.

Recommended Action

To remediate this vulnerability, apply context-aware output encoding to the user-supplied input. Specifically, use the htmlspecialchars() function to convert special characters to their corresponding HTML entities.

Example Implementation:

php echo htmlspecialchars($_GET['project'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

This will ensure the user input is treated as plain text and rendered safely by the browser.