PHP mail form is being abused

Question

I'm nowhere near a PHP expert, but I have dabbled a bit. I can make things work just fine, but I am terrible at figuring out what is wrong. I was informed by our server admin that we have a mail script that is being abused, and I am unsure of how to remedy the issue.

I am looking for help to see how someone is using this form to send out spam mail. The issue is that we got a bounce-back email sent from an address that doesn't exist to a hotmail address using this form. As far as I know, this form ONLY sends email to the $recipient which is neither this non-existent email or this Hotmail. I am trying to figure out a way to secure this form so that individuals cannot abuse this form and send mail to others through it.

<?php
$name = check_input($_POST['name'],"Enter your name.");
$email = check_input($_POST['email'],"Email address is required.");
$company = check_input($_POST['company']);
$phone = check_input($_POST['phone']);
$message = check_input($_POST['message'],"Please don't send us a blank message! Let us know what you're thinking.");
if (!preg_match("/([\w\-]+\@[\w\-]+.[\w\-]+)/",$email))
{
 show_error("E-mail address is not valid.");
}
$messageBody ="Hello!
Your contact form has been submitted by:
Name: $name
E-mail: $email
Company: $company
Phone: $phone
Message:
$message
End of message
";
$recipient = "[email protected]"; // removed real email for SE
$subject = "[Contact Form - Site Name]"; // removed site name for SE
$mailheaders = "From: [email protected]\n"; // removed real email for SE
$mailheaders .= "Reply-To:". $_POST['email']."\n\n";
mail($recipient, $subject, $messageBody, $mailheaders);
header('Location: http://www.example.com/contact/thankyou.html'); //removed real address for SE
exit();
function check_input($data, $problem='')
{
 $data = trim($data);
 $data = stripslashes($data);
 $data = htmlspecialchars($data);
 if ($problem && strlen($data) == 0)
 {
 show_error($problem);
 }
 return $data;
}
function show_error($mailError)
{
?>
// error message in here, removed for SE as unrelated to problem
<?php
exit();
}
?>

This is the message my server admin sent me:

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2014 2:47 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: failure notice
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at ss2.site-hosts.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
<[email protected]>:
65.55.37.104 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable Giving up on 65.55.37.104.
--- Below this line is a copy of the message.
Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: (qmail 6348 invoked by uid 2523); 4 Aug 2014 14:47:01 -0500
X-Qmail-Scanner-Diagnostics: from
199.192.201.219.rdns.continuumdatacenters.com by ss2.site-hosts.com (envelope-from <[email protected]>, uid 2020) with qmail-scanner-2.10st
 (clamdscan: 0.98.4/19261. mhr: 1.0. spamassassin: 3.3.2. perlscan:
2.10st. 
 Clear:RC:1(199.192.201.219):. 
 Processed in 0.024127 secs); 04 Aug 2014 19:47:01 -0000
Received: from 199.192.201.219.rdns.continuumdatacenters.com (HELO
ssasi.site-hosts.com) (199.192.201.219)
 by ss2.site-hosts.com with ESMTPA; 4 Aug 2014 14:47:01 -0500
Received: (qmail 15903 invoked by uid 10024); 4 Aug 2014 14:47:00 -0500
X-Qmail-Scanner-Diagnostics: from by ssasi.site-hosts.com (envelope-from <[email protected]>, uid 48) with qmail-scanner-2.10st
 (clamdscan: 0.98.4/19261. mhr: 1.0. spamassassin: 3.3.2. perlscan:
2.10st. 
 Clear:RC:1(127.0.0.1):. 
 Processed in 0.013521 secs); 04 Aug 2014 19:47:00 -0000
Date: 4 Aug 2014 14:47:00 -0500
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: 
X-PHP-Originating-Script: 10021:vnbMail.php

• 200_success: Welcome to Code Review, and thanks for your patience. Community members have decided that it's a fine question.
• ntoskrnl: Q: Using a regular expression to validate an email address on StackOverflow.
• pushpraj: Please note that most of the time spammers do not need your script to send an email from your email address. Such mails are also bounced back to the your email address. In that case spf and dkim may help authenticating the email .

Answer 1

I'm not a php expert, but from reading up on the documentation it appears that it may be possible to insert additional from/to addresses using the "Additional Headers" field on the mail() function.

Since you're using a regular string concatenation to insert your POST variable into your additional headers field, that is very well possibly the vector for attack. The example in the php mail() documentation demonstrates this.

<?php
$to = '[email protected]';
$subject = 'the subject';
$message = 'hello';
$headers = 'From: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
 'Reply-To: [email protected]' . "\r\n" .
 'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
?>

Answer 2

Your script is vulnerable to a header-splitting attack. Due to the poor design of PHP's mail() function, it is actually quite easy to introduce that kind of security hole.

In summary, if...

• any part of the mail headers consists of user-supplied input,
• and you didn't make any effort to prohibit newlines or escape that input,

then you will have a program that can send mail to any recipient of the attacker's choice.

Validation problems

As @EmanuelePaolini points out, you do make an attempt to validate $_POST['email']:

$email = check_input($_POST['email'],"Email address is required.");
# ...
if (!preg_match("/([\w\-]+\@[\w\-]+.[\w\-]+)/",$email))
{
 show_error("E-mail address is not valid.");
}

However, the regular expression is not anchored with ^ and $ at each end. Therefore, the code confirms that $_POST['email'] contains an e-mail address, but it fails to enforce that it contains nothing but a single e-mail address.

On the other hand, the regular expression is also too strict: it rejects many valid characters that can legally appear in an e-mail address. Read RFC 5322 Sec 3.4 for the specification, or this summary of the older RFC 822 standard.

• Emanuele Paolini: The only user supplied input which goes into the headers is $email which is checked at line 8.
• 200_success: @EmanuelePaolini But the regular expression is not anchored! I have revised the answer.

Answer 3

Never, EVER directly use a $_GET or $_POST variable without checking its content first. Instead of:

$mailheaders .= "Reply-To:". $_POST['email']."\n\n";

You should write a function like:

function secure_input($s){
 return sanitized_user_input_that_is_exactly_what_you_expect_and_nothing_else;
}

and then do

$mailheaders .= "Reply-To:". secure_input($_POST['email'])."\n\n";

on all $_GET and $_POST. Even cookies you might want to check, since they also come from user.

• Sonny: Using the built-in function filter_input() is a great idea too. $email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
• Ken: "since they also come from user." And they can be trivially modified. =)

Answer 4

$mailheaders .= "Reply-To:". $_POST['email']."\n\n";

That's it, right there. Unsanitized user content straight into the mail header.

Add the following, early on:

# only one address allowed
if( 1 != preg_match_all("/@/", $_POST['email'], $unused) ) die();
# and no funny characters either
if( preg_match("/[^a-z0-9@._-]/", strtolower($_POST['email']) ) die();

• 200_success: According to RFC822, the following characters are all also legal in e-mail addresses, even without quoting: !#$%&'*+/=?^`{|}~
• paul: And when was the last time you saw a legit email containing any of those characters?
• 200_success: I regularly use + in e-mail addresses, as in the suggested usage in GMail. You shouldn't violate standards just because you like to.
• Malachi: # are probably used by Twitter posting E-mails??? I don't use twitter so I don't know.
• J99: My email address has a * in it...

Answer 5

Another, very easy way of killing spam bots is to add an extra field called something inocuois like "subject" and make it focusable, but not visible, in the form. For example

<input type="text" name="subject" style="height: 1px; width: 1px; color: transparent;">

Now whenever someone fills any value into that field, assume it's a spam bot and silently skip the mail() call. Just return whatever normal confirmation page you display so as not to let on that you're protected.

• wp-overwatch.com: What about people using screen readers to interact with the website?
• Kristian Williams: aria-hidden="true" all but the most sophisticated spam bots will likely ignore the attribute.