Support

Admin Tools

#13084 PHP Scan taking hours

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Admin Tools version
n/a

Latest post by nicholas on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 11:03 CDT

Monday, 30 July 2012 14:25 CDT

user66927
Sorry to ticket this- can I search the tickets to see if you've answered this already?

Doing my first PHP scan now, and it's running +40 minutes now... is this normal? I have a cheapy shared hosting account (working to upgrade that very soon) and probably not a very powerful server, but should it still take this long?

I read in the manual that this will scan 3k files... at 10 seconds apiece on average, that's a looooong scan. Should I do this in the middle of the night and let it run for hours?

Monday, 30 July 2012 16:35 CDT

user66927
Follow up: this took about an hour to complete the scan. Well worth it, though I have a question:

You refer to files that trip the "false positive" but are actually fine. Here are several that threw above 100 threat scores, all related:

plugins/system/zend/Zend/Service/LiveDocx/MailMerge.php
plugins/system/zend/Zend/InfoCard/Xml/Security.php
plugins/system/zend/Zend/InfoCard.php
plugins/system/zend/Zend/OpenId/Consumer.php
plugins/system/zend/Zend/OpenId/Provider.php
plugins/system/zend/Zend/Db/Adapter/Pdo/Mssql.php

I am using Jomsocial in this site, which requires the zend library. Should I be concerned about these?

Thanks,

Tom

Tuesday, 31 July 2012 01:30 CDT

nicholas
Hello Tom,

The file scan is an intrinsically slow operation. It should take anywhere between 3 to 10 times the time it takes for Akeeba Backup to take a full site backup, depending on the number of files and the speed of your server.

Regarding the false positives, being familiar with how the PHP Scanner reacts to the JomSocial-included Zend Framework, these are safe files. However you don't have to take my word for it. The documentation includes detailed instructions for checking such files under the "Threat Score" header. I know it takes a lot of time the first time you run such a scan, but it's worth the trouble.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 31 July 2012 11:01 CDT

user66927
Thanks for the reply. The scan went fine, and I deleted some extensions that appeared vulnerable (and didn't need anyway.)

I appreciate the thought on the Zend issue. I've read of concerns about security and JomSocial, and hope they've addressed them in the Joomla 2.5 version.

Tuesday, 31 July 2012 11:03 CDT

nicholas
Please note that the PHP file scanner does not perform security auditing. It merely searches for the use of PHP features which are common among hacked files and hacking scripts. I can't vouch for the security of anyone's extensions :)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Support Information

Working hours: We are open Monday to Friday, 9am to 7pm Cyprus timezone (EET / EEST). Support is provided by the same developers writing the software, all of which live in Europe. You can still file tickets outside of our working hours, but we cannot respond to them until we're back at the office.

Support policy: We would like to kindly inform you that when using our support you have already agreed to the Support Policy which is part of our Terms of Service. Thank you for your understanding and for helping us help you!