Discord PHP Bot Security

DiscordPHP Bot Security Skill

A concrete checklist built from real findings across DiscordPHP-MTG, DiscordPHP-NHA, DiscordPHP-Voice and Civilizationbot.

1. Never send the Discord bot token to a third party

The classic bug: an extension's Http client for api.example.com is constructed with 'Bot '.$this->token and adds Authorization: <token> to every request — so the Discord bot token is sent to an unrelated host on every call.

• Extension HTTP clients for a third-party API should take an empty token and only set Authorization when a real value is present:

  $h = ['User-Agent' => $this->getUserAgent()];
  if ($this->token !== '')  $h['Authorization'] = $this->token;
  if ($this->apiKey !== null) $h['X-Api-Key'] = $this->apiKey;   // that API's own key
  

• Drop Discord-only headers (X-Ratelimit-Precision) from non-Discord clients.
• Override getUserAgent() to identify your library, not DiscordPHP-HTTP.

2. Keep tokens out of logs and exception messages

• Do not log full request/response bodies on error. A FastAPI-style 422 body echoes the request back under input — for an auth'd POST that includes the token. Redact before logging and before putting it in an exception message:

  $body = preg_replace('/("(?:nha_)?token"\s*:\s*)"[^"]*"/i', '$1"***"', $body) ?? $body;
  

• Manager/gateway code: log ['token' => '*****'], and give payload parts a __debugInfo() that redacts the token (see VoicePayload::__debugInfo()). Log identify with ['op' => $payload->op], not the whole payload.
• Global error handlers that DM a technician: send file:line:function from debug_backtrace() (no ['args']). getTraceAsString() still inlines scalar args truncated to 15 chars — a token prefix can leak. Prefer the arg-free form.

3. Keep secrets out of custom_id

Component custom_ids are sent to Discord and visible in the client. Capture the agent/session token in the server-side listener closure, never in the id or a button label. (NHA's AgentObservation::toContainer($nha, $token) does this right — $token lives only in the $submit closure.)

4. OAuth2 / CSRF / webhooks

• State / session ids: bin2hex(random_bytes(16)), never uniqid() (predictable microtime).
• Compare with hash_equals(), not === / !== — HMAC signatures and CSRF state tokens. Reject empty/absent values up front; make the state single-use (delete it after a successful exchange).
• Webhook signature: verify with hash_equals(), prefer X-Hub-Signature-256, and fail closed when the shared secret env var is unset (an unset secret makes hash_hmac key '' and every request "valid").
• Redirect URIs: always validate the effective redirect_uri against an allow-list — a caller-supplied value must not bypass the check (open redirect / auth-code interception).
• Don't log the OAuth authorization code (an exchangeable credential), the full request header set on a rejected request (a mistyped Authorization lands in the log), or contact-form email/message bodies (PII — send them to the private channel, not the log).
• Raw curl in an OAuth path: set CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => true, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST => 2, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, curl_close(), and null-check the result.

5. Repo hygiene

• .gitignore must cover .env, .env.*, composer.lock (in these repos), /var/* (state files with tokens), and any bespoke secret file (token.php, /json, botlog.txt).
• Verify nothing sensitive is tracked: git ls-files | grep -iE '\.env|token|secret|\.pem|\.key|credential'.
• Never place personal data or tokens in URL query strings (they get logged by proxies and land in Referer).

Quick grep sweep

rg -n "addQuery\(\s*['\"](token|key|secret|password)" src/          # token in URL
rg -n "(debug|info|warn|error).*(token|Authorization|getBody|payload|->data\b)" src/
rg -n "!==|===" src/ | rg -i "hash_hmac|signature|hash_equals"      # non-constant-time
rg -n "uniqid\(" src/                                               # weak randomness