Information security threats in web-portals on the open journal systems platform

• Main Authors: Anton A. Abramov, Victor S. Gorbatov, Marina N. Grishina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Moscow Engineering Physics Institute 2018-05-01
• Series: Bezopasnostʹ Informacionnyh Tehnologij
• Subjects: particular threat model, intruder model, web portal, information security threats, protection measures, php, xss, open journal systems.
• Online Access: https://bit.mephi.ru/index.php/bit/article/view/1113

This article addresses the problem of security threats while working with web portals built on the Open Journal Systems platform. The Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform was originally developed as part of the Public Knowledge Project and it is one of the most popular open-source platforms for web journals today. Based on the data available in the Public Knowledge Project, there were more than 10,000 active journals using the open journal systems platform by the end of 2016. A migration of a journal to such advanced and complex platform helps to handle the entire workflow over a single web portal. Therefore it is an important move and only peer-reviewed journals that are part of Russian and Worldwide citation systems go for it. At the same time the problem of keeping privacy for a manuscript before it is published is very important for these journals and for authors who submit it to the journal. The paper describes the most common threats for the web portals on the OJS platform as well as a particular model of the security threats, and suggests the measures that could help to neutralize these threats.