joomla/joomla-cms: technical due diligence, read from its repository

The median source file here is 78 lines. 42 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 2,553. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.

The newest release, 13.1, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is 6.2.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too. This was read from the most recent 50,000 commits (9 Dec 2006 to 3 Nov 2026) only; older history was not read.

22 places read data with a deserialiser that executes what it reads (PHP `unserialize`). That is safe on data the system wrote itself and remote code execution on anything else. Ask where each one's input comes from.

48 places set HTML from a value that is neither a literal nor passed through a sanitiser. Where the value can come from a user, that is stored cross-site scripting, and it is the first thing a buyer's security review looks for in a frontend.

Third-party code is committed into this repository without any statement of the terms it arrived under. Unknown terms are harder to deal with than inconvenient ones: an awkward licence can be complied with, an absent one cannot. Each of these needs its origin established before the code changes hands.

The newest was published on 2025-04-08. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. Whether 1 of them are fixed in the code you ship could not be told from this history: its version is only known to be at least 6.2.0. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version.