You can audit the code yourself, it’s all PHP. The plugin I see mentioned in the HTML takes all pages and generates a sitemap XML file. It’s not interactive as far as I can tell. The worst case scenario seems to be that it dumps a link to an unpublished article.
Almost every piece of software can have vulnerabilities, you can’t guarantee anything will be caught having a vulnerability or not. You can formally prove correctness of ADA programs, but even then you’re going to get SPECTRE style side channel attacks that may break code even if it’s perfectly secure based on the raw instructions generated by the compiler.
People don’t audit anything, and pretending that they do is hopeful at best, deceitful at worst.
Even if you audit it you are likely not understanding the code well enough to figure out if it is vulnerable.
Which leads back to my original point which thus still stands; there’s no smart way to choose non-vulnerable plugins. One can obviously avoid things that don’t meet certain standards (popularity, lines of code, known issues, how they’re resolved, etc.), but still doesn’t guarantee anything.
This means that your statement about “smart Wordpress sites don’t pick vulnerable plugins” is frivolous. May I suggest “smart Wordpress sites chooses plugins carefully and limits the amount to those strictly necessary, but should still pay attention to updates patching issues”. Because that’s the difference between smart and dumb. Dumb sites are just left running whatever they shipped with, PHP or not, and smart devs make sure to keep their system and/or CMS and plugins up date.
And if you still want to argue that people actually review the code they depend upon I have one word for you: Heartbleed.
Wasn’t there a funny little zero-day in a widely used Wordpress plugin just last week?
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I mean the one that was bad enough to bubble up on a front page on my phone ;)
There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress plugins and dozens of non-vulnerable ones. Smart WordPress sites don’t pick vulnerable plugins, though.
“Smart WordPress sites”, now that’s an oxymoron!
But do please tell how you figure out if a plugin will be caught having a vulnerability or not.
You can audit the code yourself, it’s all PHP. The plugin I see mentioned in the HTML takes all pages and generates a sitemap XML file. It’s not interactive as far as I can tell. The worst case scenario seems to be that it dumps a link to an unpublished article.
Almost every piece of software can have vulnerabilities, you can’t guarantee anything will be caught having a vulnerability or not. You can formally prove correctness of ADA programs, but even then you’re going to get SPECTRE style side channel attacks that may break code even if it’s perfectly secure based on the raw instructions generated by the compiler.
The fact that you can audit it has zero value.
People don’t audit anything, and pretending that they do is hopeful at best, deceitful at worst.
Even if you audit it you are likely not understanding the code well enough to figure out if it is vulnerable.
Which leads back to my original point which thus still stands; there’s no smart way to choose non-vulnerable plugins. One can obviously avoid things that don’t meet certain standards (popularity, lines of code, known issues, how they’re resolved, etc.), but still doesn’t guarantee anything.
This means that your statement about “smart Wordpress sites don’t pick vulnerable plugins” is frivolous. May I suggest “smart Wordpress sites chooses plugins carefully and limits the amount to those strictly necessary, but should still pay attention to updates patching issues”. Because that’s the difference between smart and dumb. Dumb sites are just left running whatever they shipped with, PHP or not, and smart devs make sure to keep their system and/or CMS and plugins up date.
And if you still want to argue that people actually review the code they depend upon I have one word for you: Heartbleed.