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Mortenson

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Meet Bookish, an install profile for static Drupal blogs

For the last four years I’ve been working on a static site generator for Drupal called Tome. Unlike other generators Tome uses “vanilla” Drupal, which means that if you know how to build a Drupal site, you know how to build a Tome site! One downside of this is that when comparing a default install of Drupal with a default install of something like Gatsby, Drupal looks pretty outdated. I wanted to show Tome off but couldn’t do it well with core, so I decided to focus my energy on a new install profile for static blogs - Bookish.

Taking my work private

After a few weeks of mulling, I've decided to start doing more of my work in private, and drop most of my obligations with open source projects I maintain or contribute to.

Promoting jQuery JSON to JSONP to trigger XSS

I’ve done quite a bit of security research for Drupal, and one area of exploitation that I often come back to is the AJAX API. Drupal’s AJAX API is built on top of jQuery, and lets developers easily add interactive behavior to the frontend.

Drupal services private file access bypass via IDOR

There’s a feature in Drupal that not a lot of people know about, but is a great target for security research - private files. Private files allow you to upload files to a non-public directory on your server, then serve them through Drupal instead of through your HTTP server.

Making a multiplayer game with Go and gRPC

Recently I’ve started to pick up a new programming language, Go, but have struggled to absorb lessons from presentations and tutorials into practical knowledge. My preferred learning method is always to work on a real project, even if it means the finished work has loads of flaws.

Static searches with Drupal and Lunr

As a part of my ongoing work on Tome, a Drupal static site generator, I’ve become interested in providing a solution for static searches. If you have a static site there’s typically no backend to do any server side processing, which means that search has to be done on the client or through a third party service.

Getting creative with Drupal XSS

In the world of web security, cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are extremely common, and will continue to be a problem as web applications become increasingly complex.

Chained Drupal CSRF to disable all blocks

Note: The exploit discussed in this post was never included in a stable core release, so don’t freak out! The Drupal security team quickly fixed this while 8.3.x was still in development.