Can this solve the Wordpress security nightmare ? are we going to see hosting services built on PeachPie in the near future ?
However, as software, Wordpress deserves the hate it gets. There is no real security or firewalling or permissions limiting of plugins, there is no hint of modern PHP practices like Composer integration, routing, or the use of a templating language (and no, PHP itself doesn't count) and the amount of cruft it carries with it for the sake of backwards compatibility makes it insanely complex and far more bloated than it needs to be.
Wordpress in principle is a wonderful, useful product, and anyone trying to compete with it needs to closely study what it gets right (ease of deployment, ease of extension, ease of configuration, auto-updates, plugins, etc.) as well as what it gets wrong. Wordpress in practice, though, needs to be tossed into a pit and burned.
But those are The Right __and__ The Wrong.
For example, adding Composer to the WP "stack" makes sense. But now you've eliminated 90% (?) of the WP "developers."
That is, in the Universe of WordPress Composer is more friction, not less (i.e., ease of use).
Long to short, for better or worse, WP is Justin Bieber. It will never be Radiohead.
Maybe, but it wouldn't be impossible to rebuild plugins around Composer and PSR standards. And doing so would make them better organized, and make it easier to manage third party dependencies. If you were going to build Wordpress from scratch, today, that's probably what you would do - just make plugins a special case of Composer dependencies.
The only question is, whether you would still have as robust an ecosystem with a more restrictive framework? Probably not, but the quality of plugins would probably be higher.
I filed a core bug report once. Long to short, if I passed (I think it was) false to a core function, I got very unexpected results. The dev that replied to me said, "Well then don't do that." Huh?
The idea that the function should check, that it should be aware that humans (and their code) make unexpected mistakes, was completely foreign to her / him. I lost a lot of faith that day. I lose a bit more every time I go poking around in core code. I'm no Super DevMan. So when __I__ see bad patterns you know something is wrong.
p.s. Fwiw, even the lead dog (i.e., Automattic) has some nasty code habits. Simply dumbfounding.
I can't say all, but the huge bulk of security issues I've seen revolve around some exploit which ends up writing a new file, or overwriting an existing file, which is then publicly accessible. If your file system is not writable, the large majority of WP exploits go away. However, you lose the "press here to upgrade your entire site and all the plugins in one easy step!" functionality, and the "upload files via the browser" ease-of-use.
If you're truly modifying public media files on regular basis, a non-writeable file system kinda stinks (either make the FS writeable or use an external media host, which adds complexity and cost). MOST systems I run in to aren't doing this often - it's "put up the site and updates some pages every few months" (or, blogging, which is often just text). For these, I recommend turning off write permissions to the whole of the WP system, and periodically turning it back on to do updates, then turning it off again.
Yes, this doesn't cover 100% of exploit cases, but nothing does, and I've found this to go a moderately long way to reduce the impact of various exploit attempts.
So, to answer the question, I would say "it depends". If the .net hosted version also by default allows for writeable media that is also executable, then there would be problems. However, I don't expect a .net-based system would allow you to get a ".aspx" file in a publicly accessible URL and have it just execute when accessed (unless there's some deployment mode that would allow for that?)
WP could address some of this by requiring plugin media/js assets to be copied over to public folders during an 'init' process, while requiring the core PHP code to be outside of the document root/public area. But it would break on certain hosting platforms (I know that years ago, Plesk templates would enforce that nothing could live outside the document root - every upgrade they'd change all PHP permissions to only allow PHP execution inside the document root, perpetuating poor security practices for anyone who wanted to host on plesk-managed servers).
The problems with Wordpress are mostly:
1. WP installations are often not properly configured or maintained.
2. The plugin ecosystem is a mess of vulnerable and/or malicious code, or simply dead code that isn't maintained yet still deployed in the wild.
I’d hate to see what you think is terrible then.
What wordpress does is basically glorified printf, substituting values into a string.
If you can’t see how this is a danger, you’re in no position to comment on the quality of the code.
My point stands. The worst problems in Wordpress are the plugin ecosystem and poorly maintained instances.
Go read https://blog.ircmaxell.com/2017/10/disclosure-wordpress-wpdb...
A couple of little snippets to highlight the point I'm trying to make:
> The current system is insecure-by-design. That doesn’t mean it’s always hackable, but it means you have to actively work to make it not attackable. It’s better to switch to a design that’s secure-by-default and make the insecure the exceptional case.
> The best path forward would be to switch to PDO/MySQLi and use real prepared statements and not emulate them in PHP land. That’s the best path forward.
But given that the core wordpress team basically ignore this type of suggestion from PHP core contributors, why would I expect you to believe me about it here?
That a POST param even was used to as the path to a file to delete without sanitizing it is not usually indicative of "secure coding practices".