Browsing articles in "Magento Imagine"
Jun 9, 2019
kalpesh

#MagentoImagine2019 Dev Exchange Recap – Make Magento more secure

Magento Imagine 2019 Dev Exchange

Magento Imagine 2019 Dev Exchange

This year Magento Imagine conference was amazing, around 3,500 people from around the world attended the event which was held at Wynn, Las Vegas. I met many people whom I already knew, and many more whom I never met before in real life but interacted on social media and forums.

I hosted a table at Dev Exchange around Magento security, which was co-hosted by Pablo Benitez from eBizmarts. Piotr Kaminski and Steven Zurek participated from Magento/Adobe’s side. Talesh Seeparsan took all the notes and contributed to the discussion during the talk. Other people that joined the table from Magento and community were Igor Miniailo, Igor Gorin, Georgiy Slobodenyuk, Lee Saferite, Manish Mittal, Jeanne, Scott N and Shilpa M. Everyone participated in the discussion and gave their valuable feedback on the topics we discussed, overall it was very productive.

There were 4 main topics we discussed at the table:

1. Extension developers write secure code

With the proactive and nimble approach Magento has taken to core security, many time agencies and merchants find external 3rd party extension makers have not put in as much effort. How can we encourage their developers to take a more secure coding approach? Can Magento community maintain secure coding practices document like technical guidelines, security? Validate code using a tool like PHP CodeSniffer? What solutions already exist that we can rely on? What processes already exist that we can implement?

Static Scanners / RIPS:

Third party code checking and code scanning is a complex process. RIPS work for some paths, they are also working on improving the support. We can add Regular Expressions to the old open source versions as well. However, we have to do lot of work to deal with the false positives because they don’t directly support Magento.

Dynamic Scanners:

Probably Dynamic Scanning is the better idea. Example, using OWASP Zap to test input fields of extensions. There are current efforts to get an easy to set up OWASP Zap fuzzer for Magento Extension makers.

There is a danger of reporting error in extensions without understanding the value of the error or making it easy to act on the error. Example, using tools that just dump a PDF of all the errors versus categorizing and ranking problems and putting them into bug tracker. We should have documentation of recommended fixes for the types of errors dynamic scanning provides.

Vulnerabilities in extensions:

A lot of extension providers are not prepared for a vulnerability in their extension. There are a few common problems with their approach. The problems we find with them, they are:

  • Not fixing vulnerabilities and ignoring input from developer community, or
  • Fixing vulnerabilities silently and not notifying their customers, or
  • No way of notifying their customers of a new version with a fix.

There should be a process for responding to security vulnerabilities if extension makers want their extensions to be on the Marketplace. There should be consequences instead of enforcement when dealing with extension makers with vulnerabilities.

Marketplace vs non-marketplace extensions:

Unfortunately, most of the problems that we see are in extensions that are not from Marketplace, therefore enforcement of security policies may have the unintended consequence of reducing the number of extensions on the Magento Marketplace. One possible solution to extensions not on marketplace is that there may be a warning in Magento if it is code matched to an extension that is on the marketplace. This works for vendors that sell the same extension on Marketplace and on their own site.

One of the driving reasons for buying extensions from outside the marketplace is because updates from the Marketplace are too slow. The process is improving though.

It would be good if the marketplace extensions page would show the version that is on the Marketplace and show which past versions may be vulnerable.  Continue reading »

Apr 28, 2019
kalpesh

Magento Imagine Dev Exchange 2019

Magento Imagine 2019 is just 2 weeks away, I cannot wait any longer now! This year would be crazy for me, as I am participating in Contribution Days as a Maintainer that happens on Saturday and Sunday before the conference, and also hosting a Dev Exchange table after the conference on Wednesday. Also, this would be my first Imagine from agency side, so things would be different.

As many of you know, I have advocated Magento Security for quite a while now. From submitting core security bugs to adding an entire Security topic in the Magento 2 Professional Developer Plus certification, I realized there is many more things to do. This year I am going to host Dev Exchange where I will share my security ideas and also get ideas and feedback from the community. One very important thing that we would address this year is third-party extensions security. Pablo Benitez, CTO at eBizmarts, will join me bringing in business perspective when talking about third-party extension security. Talesh Seeparsan will bring his past Dev Exchange experiences on security and help us in guiding and noting down all the ideas and feedback that we would discuss with all the participants.

If you are coming to Magento Imagine and would stay little late on Wednesday, please stop by our Dev Exchange table and join the conversation. Here is the topic and details we submitted for Magento Imagine Dev Exchange 2019:

 

Continue reading »

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Kalpesh MehtaHelping Magento developers in their day-to-day development problems since 2011. Most of the problems and solutions here are my own experiences while working on different projects. Enjoy the blog and don't forget to throw comments and likes/+1's/tweets on posts you like. Thanks for visiting!

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