Security.txt Magento module

With the recent release of Magento 2.4.0 open source and commerce, you can find a brand new module under vendor/magento/ directory named module-securitytxt. You may find it a small module, but you will amaze to know the importance of that module in terms of the security. Two years ago, I was reading the blog post from Troy Hunt and other reputed people in the security industry about this new file called Security.txt which allows security researchers to report security vulnerabilities to the right people in the organization. I am amazed by this, because of my personal experience in not getting hold of right people in the organization whenever I find any security vulnerability on any website. I found security issues on numerous websites before reading about security.txt, and tried many ways to reach out to the people in the organization in an effort to get a hold of someone who is responsible to fix this. I sent messages to the people working in that organizations via LinkedIn, Twitter DM, tech email addresses I could find from whois, customer service, etc.. But, zero replies!! Of course, who would want to reply to such scary messages about their website right?!

Security.txt to the rescue

As soon as I learned about security.txt, I read many articles and checked its official website https://securitytxt.org/ to understand how it works. I really liked the concept, and thought to make it available to everyone in the very platform I love, Magento. I built Magento 2 module to allow administrators to input and store all the security contact details and signature in the database, which can be then easily viewed at the standard locations https://website.com/.well-known/security.txt and https://website.com/.well-known/security.txt.sig

Security.txt files have been adopted by many big players in the industry like Google, GitHub, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Listen to the community

Right after building the module and pushing it to my Github securitytxt repo, I was gathering feedbacks about this new security standard from the Magento community. I asked many well known people in the community, at various events and Dev Exchange, to understand its pros/cons from other people’s perspective. Unsurprisingly, many were in favor of this. There were some people against having a dedicated module for this, because Magento already has many modules that not every merchants need but they still have to keep it because… it comes out of the box. Totally valid point. However, this is a security module and Magento 2 was already infested with security bugs in the early days and not to mention security bugs that gets introduced via third-party extensions. With the modular approach of the securitytxt, it is very convenient for any merchant to enable and input security contact details and save right from the admin, which hardly takes 2 minutes! I do not know why anyone would want to disable any security module tbh. Before the module, there were hardly any merchants who had uploaded security.txt file on their server, even though the argument was it is the easiest approach so why to introduce a module for that. Ultimately, reward outweighed the risk and it was decided to ship this module in the core bundle.

I presented security.txt’s importance in various meetups last year and gathered feedbacks from the event attendees as well.

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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:

Do you have ideas to make #Magento more secure? Are you interested in participating on security-related discussion at #MagentoImagine? Then please vote/comment here (deadline 4/26) and stop by our DevExchange table https://t.co/ZNoLSwScrH. cc/ @_Talesh @centerax @foomanNZ @ext_dn pic.twitter.com/eGS0vF8P6R

— Kalpesh Mehta (@kalpmehta) April 25, 2019

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I am one of the Top 50 Magento Contributors of 2018

This week Magento announced top contributors from the past year. I was so thrilled to see my name in the top 50 Magento contributors of 2018. It is an honor to be on that list, with other Magento legends most of whom are/were Magento Masters.

A round of applause, please, for the Top 50 Contributors in 2018! Keep an eye out for more great contributions from these community members #MagentoCommunity #MagentoDevelopers #Magento https://t.co/8kP7WNl1Ep pic.twitter.com/JSzK5fxhBh

— Magento (@magento) February 5, 2019

It is just incredible that there were 5,900 contributors that Magento can quantify in 2018. I am so proud to be in the top 1% of the contributors who were recognized in the Top 50 contributors list. It is a very difficult job to find who contributed most or whose contributions impacted most given such a large community contributors, but Sherrie Rohde, Magento Community Manager, just excels in that.

As a side note, there were over 5,900 contributors (that we know of and could quantify) in the Magento Community in 2018. My mind is blown. 5,900?!

Literally the best community that exists, not that I'm biased. 🧡

— Sherrie Rohde (@sherrierohde) February 5, 2019

For all those contributors who couldn’t make it to the top 50 list, here is a thankful quote by Sherri with an orange heart!

Thank you so much to these 50, but also to the rest of you who continue to help this community in ways that are unique and central to you! Contributing isn't about being recognized, but recognizing is one small way that we can thank you. 🧡 https://t.co/65xLtv4zEI

— Sherrie Rohde (@sherrierohde) February 5, 2019

Keep contributing!!

Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer Plus Workshop

Last month I and Jonathan from Corra participated in the M2 Developer Plus certification workshop which happened in London. The goal of this new certification is to test the developers’ skills in Magento 2 Commerce and Open Source. This exam is intended to be difficult than the Professional Developer that was launched earlier this year. The exam will be scenario-based, so don’t come memorizing class and method names to the exam, it will not help 🙂

Participants

Developers from Magento, an Adobe Company and few SIs participated in this workshop to come up with the questions for this exam. Everybody was highly skilled in Magento 2, and submitted very good questions which will make it difficult for the developers to pass this exam 🙂 Partners who participated – Corra (I an Jonathan Lorenzi), Something Digital (Max Chadwick), DCKAP (Jaykanth), Vaimo (Sergii) and Cream NL (Julian).  And there were Alex Paliarush and Iryna from Magento. Vitaliy Golomoziy and Vinai Kopp were top of the game, submitting and reviewing some crazy amount of questions respectively. It was great to work with all these awesome folks for four days. This was all possible under the guidance of Peter Manijak, Director of Certification & Special Programs at Magento U.

New topics

This exam added two new topics that are different than Professional exam. First one is of course Magento 2 Commerce features. The other one, which I personally advocated for few years to include in different areas of the Magento ecosystem, is Magento Security.

Magento Security

I proposed this topic to Peter Manijak few weeks before the workshop, he really liked the idea and gave his support to include this in the certification. We were not sure whether to add objectives in other topics or to create an entire new topic for this. Peter took this to the team and we agreed to keep it as it’s own topic. We also got support on this topic from Richard Huie-Buckius, Head of Training & Certification Services at Magento, an Adobe Company. I am very grateful to Peter and Richard for understanding the importance of Security in Magento and making it a part of the certification. Peter is personally a big fan of Security so huge props to him on including this additional topic to the exam.

The goal to introduce Magento Security in the exam is to test developers’ abilities in security area when they develop something in Magento. Security is a part of development, every developer who works on Magento needs to know at least the basics of security to write secure code while developing extensions or custom in-house modules. The exam will test the developers on frontend, backend and overall architectural related security questions. For full details, wait for the study guide 🙂

Launch date

The certification will be available to the developers in November 2018 (as per the tweet from Magento U handle).

The Certified Professional Developer PLUS exam creation workshop is well underway in London!! If you are an experienced Magento 2 Developer and are a Certified Professional Developer, keep an eye out on the website for exam details coming this November! pic.twitter.com/fTX9gSrCMV

— Magento U (@MagentoU) September 26, 2018

Thanks

It was a great opportunity for me to participate in this workshop. I learned a lot from all the participants and am thankful to Peter Manijak and Corra for allowing me to participate in the workshop!

Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer Exam Experience

M2 Certified Professional Developer test is here for a while now and I finally got some time to prepare and appear for this test. It asks you 60 questions which you have to answer in a time limit of 90 minutes. So basically you get 1.5 minutes to answer each question. Though you should not waste time if you are able to answer the question quicker, as there are many questions in the test which are lengthy and requires more time to understand the question. If you are a non-native English speaker, you may have to read some of the questions 2-3 times before fully understanding what it is exactly asking. Passing score is 64% – so you need to get 39 correct answers out of 60, which is almost 2 out of 3 questions. At the end of the test, you get the score on screen which is great to know instantly if you passed or you need to re-take the test.

Yesterday I took the M2 Professional Developer test and passed it. I found it difficult to be honest, questions were lengthy and answers were confusing. Magento recommends developers to at least have 1.5 to 2 years of experience before taking this test to pass, but I think you can still go for the test if you have worked on 4-5 Magento 2 projects hands on with around a year of experience. I believe that is enough if you are fully into Magento and understand the architecture of the system and technical concepts of various features it offers.

I found SwiftOtter very useful, along with it’s practice test where it offers 44 questions https://swiftotter.com/technical/certifications/magento-2-certified-developer-practice-test. However, it’s not guaranteed that you will pass solely by studying their guide and practice test. You also need to understand the code and should have experience working on it in the M2 projects to clear the exam. I suggest taking the practice test once you have read and understood the topics in the guide and Magento DevDocs and are ready to face the real test.

It’s evident there’s a lot of hard work done by the Magento U team and developers who contributed to this test by writing questions and answers. It’s really hard to pass this test if you don’t have deep understanding in Magento 2 concepts and don’t have enough practical knowledge to prove your M2 abilities.

I think this test could have done even better if it had also focused on:

Security – Not a single question was asked on this topic. I am not talking about Payment, PCI and Magento Vault things when I say Security, I mean writing code that does not leave behind security vulnerabilities. It should be must for a backend or full-stack developer to at least have a basic understanding of how to write secure code, Magento had a great opportunity to include some good security questions (like CSRF token, escaping user-submitted data, XSS prevention, preventing file path exploits, sanitizing user data before saving/getting from db, etc..) here, but….

Readability – Most of the Magento developers are from non-native English speaking countries, myself included. I feel there were few lengthy questions which were just difficult to understand for non-native speakers. I also heard similar complaints from few developers who took this test confirming that they had to read some of the questions 2-3 times which took much of their time to just understand what the questions were trying to ask. That’s a disadvantage to many developers and I believe Magento U will take a note of that when writing upcoming new test questions.

Let me know your thoughts! Kudos to Magento U team for creating such an outstanding test.