White-box penetration testing with Xdebug: Debugging for PHP vulnerabilities

This article describes how to configure Xdebug in a Dockerized PHP environment to perform white-box penetration testing: it walks through required files (Dockerfile, docker-compose, xdebug.ini, launch.json), demonstrates debugging a vulnerable SQL injection snippet to observe how payload filtering can be bypassed, and summarizes common PHP weaknesses and guidance for using code analysis to improve black-box testing.