Which function, protected or private is more secure?

Question

I do not know if this is a good question. But which function, protected or private is more secure? Secure, I mean, access to external functions. Secure, I mean when I hack the code to get variables, using which will be harder to do??

You mean whether or not "external functions" can access protected or private methods? Or what does it mean? — Felix Kling, May 09 '18 at 20:33
I think you may be better looking up how variable scoping works in your language of choice. — GrumpyMonkey, May 09 '18 at 20:34
*"when I'm hacking code variables"* And what does that mean now? — Felix Kling, May 09 '18 at 20:38

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered May 09 '18 at 20:43

Actualy these are not about security in the way you mean. It depends on which type of application your are trying to develop. All three types are secure if they are used in the right way.

If you are going to use the functions everywhere in the program you should use public. If you want to use them only when they are needed by the classes that extends that class you have to use protected. If you want to use it only inside that class you should use private.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 09 '18 at 20:33

This largely depends on context. Security to what? External access? Visibility modifiers are not going to stop data leaking outside of your application and you should know all the code that is live in your production environment.

I would be more focused on the likes of:

buffer overflows
SQL injection (e.g. use mysqli prepared statements and not mysql)
source code availability
cross-site request forgery
session hijacking.

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 09 '18 at 20:36

2

Private : Access is possible only from inside the class (other methods).
Protected : Access is possible only for inheriting classes.
Public : Access is possible from any object

answered May 09 '18 at 20:36

Reda Meskali

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*"Access is possible only for inheriting classes."* and from other own class methods of course. – Felix Kling May 09 '18 at 20:37
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as far as i can recall, `friend` objects can access private methods/variables too – Ali Yılmaz May 09 '18 at 20:38
@AliYılmaz Sure but php doesn't support friend-like declarations – Reda Meskali May 09 '18 at 20:45

Which function, protected or private is more secure?

3 Answers3