Tag: REST

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Introduction to the Magento REST APIs with oAuth in Version 1.7

The latest version of Magento (1.7rc1 right now) has support for oAuth authenticated REST APIs, yippee! In this post I’m going to run through the technical aspects of setting up the Magento oAuth and making your first Magento REST API call.

I’m presenting on APIs during the technology track at the Magento Imagine conference on Tuesday (If you’re reading this, and you’re at the conference, I hope to see you there!). In my talk I’ll cover interesting uses and benefits of the REST API but won’t have time for a big fully worked example. This post details the finer points of actually using these APIs which is a bit too low-level to cover, so this will be extra-for-experts homework for those that want to have a play around with REST after the talk.

There are basically 3 steps to running your first REST API call in Magento.
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Magento CSRF attack: A Simple Explanation

Everyone with a Magento store will recently have seen the notification that a possible CSRF attack against the Magento admin interface has surfaced. I thought I would take this opportunity to give a quick overview to CSRF(Cross-site request forgery) attacks, particularly how they work against web administration panels such as Magento and ways to protect Magento and other web applications from these sort of attacks.

The CSRF Basics

The easiest way to explain the attack is to think about what is happening under the hood when you are navigating a web page. You browser makes requests to the remote server for content, and to manipulate data stored on the server. In a strict RESTful approach to web applications, your browser will make GET requests when you are reading information and POST or PUT requests when you are creating or updating information.

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