How Secure is Drupal?

Drupal, a company founded in 2007, is a leading Content Management System (CMS) provider. It is considered among the top choices in open source CMS. The reason why Drupal gained popularity is because of the ease of website creation without much technical barriers. As per a stat by Builtwith, more than 1.7 million websites today use Drupal. As an open source CMS, Drupal allows users to make websites and applications with ease. With more than 13,000 modules, Drupal community allows developers to quickly add multiple features to their site.

Being an open source system, there are multiple questions around the security of Drupal. Drupal is carefully tested by experts, and they are keeping it extremely secure. It has a remarkable performance history concerning security, and has an organized process for exploring, validating, and publishing possible security glitches. The data is continuously conveyed, passwords are encoded and the community analyses the modules. That is why it is trusted by many big organizations that deal with huge data on a daily basis.

How Secure is Drupal?

Dedicated Security Team

Drupal's security team currently consists of over 30 people from various companies and organizations from around the world. These people manage CMS security and their job is to identify and rectify the security vulnerabilities in Drupal’s core platform. Drupal has acquired a good reputation – through proficiency and extreme focus on security matters. It is supported by volunteers as well.

Secure Access

Drupal account passwords are encoded, hashed and salted, when they are saved in the database. It can support a wide variety of password policies, such as minimum length, complexity, or expiration. SSL and 2-factor authentication is also supported by Drupal. Various single sign-on systems are incorporated with Drupal in production applications Shibboleth, like LDAP, SAML and OpenID.

Secure, Open Source Code Base

Thanks to the diligent work the Drupal security team and the community at large Drupal’s core code base is very stable and secure. Any user contributed module to extend Drupal is build off of this extensively-reviewed base and undergoes the same scrutiny by the Drupal community. A contributed module must first be approved by the team of Drupal core maintainers before being released to the larger community. Once released, users can download it, analyze the code and submit bug reports. All of this happens in plain sight because Drupal is fully transparent, open source software.

Granular User Access Control

Administrators can be provided full control over who can see and who can amend every part of a site in Drupal. There is a system of extensible user roles and access permissions in it. Administrators can form distinct user roles and provide them particular, restricted permissions.

Database Encryption

Encryption of database can be done using Drupal. It can be configured at each level to encode the database. Database of an entire website or just a fragment of the website’s database; for example various content types, forms, user accounts, etc. can be encrypted.

Actively Security reporting

To ensure top-level security of any CMS, It should be up to date. Moreover, add-ons and plugins should be kept updated. The website should be properly configured as well. Drupal has this quality of continuously updating and recommending you with the most recent version of CMS and its plugins. These notifications help us in fixing as well as avoiding vulnerabilities on time.

Enhance Drupal Security

You can enhance Drupal security by using various modules such as:

Login Security

It improves the security options in the login operation of a Drupal site. By using this module, a site administrator can safeguard and limit access by adding access control features to the login forms. By enabling this module, site administrator can limit rate of login attempts and block the access and can set this limit and block an IP temporary or permanent. To download and install this module, click here:Login Security

CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human or bot. It is used to hinder form submissions by spam bots. It can be used with all types of forms. To download and install this module, click here: CAPTCHA

Automated Logout

By Enabling this module, site administrator can log users out after a specified time of inactivity. It is vastly customizable module. To download and install this module, click here:Automated Logout

Seckit

With the help of Seckit module, you can alter certain HTTP headers on your website to well enhance the security. It helps you in reducing the threats of exploitation of different web application vulnerabilities. To download and install this module, click here:Seckit

Antibot

Antibot module is used to eradicate robotic form submissions on your website in an advanced-fashion. It works completely behind the scenes and doesn't require any interaction from the end-users (no annoying CAPTCHAs!). The only requirement to the end user is that they must have JavaScript enabled. Antibot works on mobile and touch-screen devices. To download and install this module, click here:Antibot

Encrypt

Encrypt is a Drupal module that provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for performing symmetric or asymmetric encryption. It lets integrating modules to encrypt and decrypt data in a uniform fashion. Encrypt doesn't offer any user-facing features of its own, apart from administration pages. To download and install this module, click here:Encrypt

Government Sites Using Drupal

Today, hundreds of federal government websites are developed on Drupal platform.Drupal CMS has a huge market share when it comes to public sector units. Here are few examples of government sites which use Drupal:

• NASA:
• The Australian Government
• U.S. Dept. of Transportation's
• New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority
• Federal Emergency Management Agency
• The Department Of Energy
• The State of Georgia
• Department of Justice

Conclusion

With an extensive team taking care of the security for Drupal users, it has proven to be a secure CMS that is designed keeping in mind the robust security standards. The stringent legal framework and legal guidelines of Drupal make it inherently secure. Organizations at a global level, including leading corporations, brands, and governments, manage their websites using Drupal.