This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on a CentOS 5.4 server. From the Suhosin project page: "Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations that was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination.
The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections."

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I have tested this on a CentOS 5.4 server with the IP address 192.168.0.100.

I will install both Suhosin parts in this tutorial, the Suhosin patch (for which we need to recompile PHP5) and the Suhosin PHP extension. To see what Suhosin can do, please refer to http://www.hardened-php.net./ The features of the Suhosin patch are listed under Engine Protection (only with patch); all the other features come with the Suhosin extension.

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