Title: 8 Prominent Reasons Why Drupal is Acclaimed as the Most Secure CMS
1(No Transcript)
2Drupal is the third most widely used CMS in the
World and is considered the most secure among the
top three open source CMSs (Drupal, WordPress and
Joomla!). In todays post our Drupal development
experts are going to compile a list of eight
solid reasons why you can trust Drupal with your
business website.
3- Prior to that lets find out what Drupals
founder and project lead Dries Buytaert has to
say on Drupal security. According to him there
are many reasons that make Drupal secure
including - Open source development model Dries says that by
the time he comes at a patch in Drupal Core, its
usual that 2030 more people would have seen it.
This extreme pre-review is possible because of
the open source development model of Drupal which
is unusual to find in any proprietary software
company. - Dedicated security team There are almost 3040
people in the Drupal security team and it is much
larger than any other proprietary software
companys security team. - Drupals reach Almost 2 percent of the websites
of the world is powered by Drupal. Since many
government agencies and entrepreneurs are using
Drupal, they usually conduct a formal security
audit on the source code. Therefore, it wont be
wrong to say, Drupal is being audited more than
anything else.
4- Before we dive deep into the aspects that make
Drupal secure and a platform that you can trust
your site with, lets take heed from the words of
a worlds most famous hacker, Kevin Mitnick. When
asked, How easy is it to hack a system? He
replied, Any type of operating system that I
wanted to be able to hack, I basically
compromised the source code, copied it over to
the university because I didnt have enough space
on my 200 megabyte hard drive. - Since, Drupals source code undergoes extreme
pre-review and is audited more than any other
code in the world, this warrants the fact that it
has the most concrete security.
Now lets move on to the eight points that would
validate the fact that Drupal has the most
concrete security and why it is hailed as the
most secure CMS
51 Large and engaging community Drupal boasts of
one of the largest and most engaging community in
the world with more than 1 million developers,
trainers, coordinators, strategists, designers,
editors and sponsors on board. They work
collectively, proactively and continuously to
shape the platform and review the code and
functionality. With all these eyes constantly
scrutinizing the code for errors ensures that any
vulnerability found will be reported to the
security team and dealt with promptly. Thus, any
serious vulnerability making its way into the
official Drupal Core release is considered an
extremely rare possibility.
62 Drupal security team As millions of websites
breathe on Drupal, the security of this platform
is the primary focus of the community. Hence, a
Drupal security team was formed in 2005
comprising of 40 security experts from all over
the world. They analyze and identify security
vulnerabilities in the Drupal Core as well as the
community-contributed modules. The team then
rectifies these issues by providing resources and
assistance also by releasing documentation on
secure coding practices in order to help
developers protect their sites by overcoming
security related glitches in their code.
7- 3 Meets with OWASP standards
- Drupal is secure by design, in other words, it is
designed in such a manner that it effectively
meets with all the security standards set by the
Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). - OWASP is a global not-for-profit charitable
organization dedicated to improving the security
of software. The organization has identified a
list of top 10 security risks so that softwares
are actively screened for them to avert future
risks of security - Injection
- Broken Authentication and Session Management
- Cross Site Scripting XSS
- Insecure Direct Object Reference
- Security Misconfiguration
- Sensitive Data Exposure
- Missing Function Level Access Control
- Cross Site Request Forgery CSRF
- Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities
- Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
8Drupal is built upon a rich set of APIs and you
can mitigate common security risks by their
correct usage. Moreover, Drupal also addresses
each of the aforementioned OWASP top 10 security
risks effectively.
9- 4 Stable and secure codebase
- Even though Drupal is an open source software,
its core code base is highly stable and secure
thanks to the proficiency of Drupal security team
in minimizing the chances of error. They
thoroughly scrutinize each and every module
contributed by a user and then approve it to make
it available for the community. - Furthermore, if you belong to the Drupal
community, you too have the authority to download
a code and report any issue or bug that you
identify. - No wonder that many enterprises bank on Drupal to
build futuristic web apps!
105 Password security When you install Drupal, for
the first time, the password is stored in the
database in an encrypted form.Your password is
salted and hashed many times in order to mitigate
dictionary and brute force attacks. Salting is
a method of safeguarding passwords in storage by
adding random data called salt to the password
which is then processed with a cryptographic hash
function. The purpose of salting is to make
cracking of the password in storage near
impossible and at the same time, safer and more
complex than the hashed equivalent of the user
entered password. The password security is then
further improved by adding many user contributed
modules to support SSL certificates and 2-factor
authentication. You can also integrate single
sign-on systems like Google sign-in or OpenID to
provide another login option to your users.
116 Authorized access controls Drupal allows you
to set up access controls that have full
authority. In other words, it lets you create
categorized accounts for various categories of
websites. For instance, if you create a blogging
site then you can set different level of
permissions and limit writers, editors or
publishers to their defined roles. Thus, the user
account can have separate access controls for
users with different roles. This feature
improves the security of your application by
restricting users from performing tasks that they
are not supposed to execute and thus makes keeps
the app glitch-free.
127 Database encryption Drupal allows you to
configure it in order to encrypt the database on
various levels. You can either encrypt the whole
website database or specific parts of the
database such as user accounts, content types,
forms, etc. These top-notch levels of
encryptions allow you to configure Drupal such
that it passeslaws of coding industry or various
privacy standards like PCI, HIPPA.
138 Drupal has built-in security reporting Want to
ensure top-level security for your CMS? Just make
sure that your website is properly configured and
the software as well as the add-ons or plugins,
if any, are up to date. The good thing about
Drupal is that it comes with the feature of
providing notifications regarding updating
details and recommendations. This is to ensure
that in case any vulnerability appears on your
site, it is patched immediately. Now you have
the key to keep your website safe and prevent
exploits by cyber criminals.
14Summing up Drupal is considered as the most
secure CMS because of the aforementioned reasons
constant screening of source code, secure user
access controls, top-notch security, engaging
community and more. That is why Drupal is counted
upon by many government and educational
institutions as well as industry
giants. UNESCO, White House, Harvard
University, Fox News, Tesla Motors, Lamborghini an
d Walt Disney are few eminent names to
mention. However, the naysayers highlight the
complexity of Drupal as its con. You can easily
overcome this only drawback just collaborate
with a Drupal development company like us and
join the bandwagon of industry-leading brands
that entrusted their business websites with
Drupal.
Originally published at https//goo.gl/78wVgR