security
WordPress Security Tips
I attended the WordCamp Birmingham conference this past weekend to find out more about all things WordPress. WordPress is an open source blog engine/lightweight Content Management System (CMS) that has a huge community of users and developers, and an enormous repository of plugins to extend its functionality.
One of the presentations I attended, Mitch Canter’s session on WordPress Security, had 6 good tips for making your WordPress-based site more secure:
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Validating the Referer: Not as Useless as I Thought?
I used the validate the HTTP referer header to verify that users were accessing certain pages from certain other pages. For example, users accessing sampleapp/edit.cfm should be getting there from sampleapp/index.cfm. Anyone accessing sampleapp/edit.cfm without coming from sampleapp/index.cfm was probably monkeying around and should be send back to the index page, or possibly even logged out.
However, it is fairly trivial to modify your referer header, so anyone who wants to monkey around with sampleapp/edit.cfm can make it look like they are coming from sampleapp/index.cfm. (If you’re interested in modifying your HTTP headers, I suggest checking out the Tamper Data Firefox plugin.) The check provides absolutely no assurance that the user is really coming from the page. Therefore, I decided the check was useless.
I’ve been attending a weekly web application security study group with some of my colleagues for the past several weeks, where we’ve been reading and discussing The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook. The past couple sessions have been about cross-site scripting (XSS). Justin Klein Keane brought up a good point at today’s session: checking the referer may not keep a malicious user from altering his or her referer string, but could help identify victims of XSS attacks who were possibly directed to submit malicious data from a third-party site.
Checking the referer isn’t a sufficient protection against malicious users, by any means, but it could still be helpful. What do you think?