Subscribe to
the Possibilities Ezine

Subscription Terms of Service
Privacy Policy

RSS feed links

Blog Article Categories

Automation

CGI

Content Protection

CSS

Debugging

HTML

JavaScript

Perl

PHP

Recommendations

Related Sites

Statistics

Web Development

Web Site Maintenance

Misc

Totally Secret Hidden Fields

By Will Bontrager

A feature of the latest version of Master Form V4 lets your form's hidden fields be totally secret.

With regular type="hidden" form fields, anyone who can view the web page source code can see those fields.

It's nobody else's business, really, whether or not you have an email sent to you or if you store the form information in a database or what your server paths are. Right? Right.

What you do is cut the hidden fields from your form, the ones you want to be secret, and paste them into another file. Then, add one hidden field to the form so Master Form V4 knows where to find your file of secret hidden fields.

Now, someone might see that one hidden field and determine where your file of secret fields is at.

Here is an easy 2-step solution to keeping the snoopers out:

1. Give the secret hidden fields file a name with a .cgi extension. Master Form V4 doesn't care what name the file has, so something.cgi is an excellent way to hide its contents.

2. Put the file of secret hidden fields is in the cgi-bin somewhere, maybe in the same directory where Master Form V4 is installed.

Now, anybody who attempts to snoop will only see an Internal Server Error message.

Make your critical hidden fields secret. Totally secret.

August 11, 2006

Please note: Articles on this website are presented "as is". However -

If you have a question about a CGI script, HTML, CSS, PHP, or JavaScript
Ask one of our Experts and you'll have your answer!
Click here for details.

© 1998-2001 William and Mari Bontrager
© 2001-2008 Bontrager Connection, LLC