Homebrew CMS security improvements

2019-02-02 21:07:00

Did you know that Mozilla offer a great resource called Observatory? This tool scans your website and provides you focused instructions on how to improve the basic security of your site. It'll help you prevent the most common causes for XSS, CSRF and more! With about an hour's work, I've taken my site from an F score to A+ :)

Now, it's been ages since I've first started work on this website of mine. Can't properly recall when I first started, but it's been at least tens years since version 1.0. I will readily admit that I'm an utter, utter hack: self-taught, borrowing code left and right, just trying to get things work. Along the way I've picked up security lessons, mostly on how to prevent SQLi and XSS. And now, thanks to Observatory I've learned more! 

Mozilla's web security guidelines document has been a great help! Until this week I'd never heard of HSTS or CSP, so I've taken time to improve my site's security posture. This included properly sourcing my own Javascript and diking out a lot of the JS I'd been sourcing externally (reCaptcha, Google Analytics, etc), just because they were dead weight to me. I had heard about SRI before through Troy Hunt's excellent article about Javascript supply chain security.

Anywho. It's been a learning experience! This little blog of mine ain't pretty, nor very exciting, but it's my little home and it makes a nice testbed to practice coding.

Some useful resources that helped me along:


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