As a web developer, you must protect your application from malicious attacks. In this guide, we’ll discuss some best practices for preventing security risks in web applications. We recommend that you follow these tips to make sure that your application is secure and reliable:
Use HTTPS
HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP. It is the protocol that most websites use. It uses SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) to encrypt traffic between your browser and the website you’re visiting. This encryption helps prevent man-in-the-middle attacks that could allow someone to intercept sensitive information, such as passwords or credit card numbers.
HTTPS also prevents website spoofing. If someone tries to trick you into thinking their part of another site when really they aren’t, then using HTTPS can help protect against this kind of fraudulence. It encrypts all connections so no one else can read them without first being authenticated.
Perform Input Validation
Input validation is the process of checking input data to ensure it is in the correct format and meets certain constraints. Your developers can do it both at the client and server levels.
For example:
- You can implement validation in JavaScript code on your website through CSS classes or attributes (for example, [input type=”email”]). This will allow you to see if there are any errors before submitting your form or login page. Still, it won’t prevent any potential vulnerabilities from entering your system from third parties who may try to exploit them.
- You can also perform validation via JavaScript functions written within server-side scripts such as PHP or Python. However, this method requires additional overhead due to communication between browser processes across multiple servers, which makes it more difficult for developers to work remotely without direct access.
Handle Exceptions Properly
Handling exceptions is a crucial part of eliminating security risks in web applications. If you don’t handle them properly, they can lead to inconsistent states or even crashes in your application.
The best way to handle exceptions is to catch them and log them before proceeding with the rest of your code. This helps you understand what went wrong and how you should continue processing after an error has occurred. It also allows other parts of your application (such as logging) to operate without interruption when an exception occurs.
Restrict URL Access
You can use a firewall to restrict access to web pages and their content. Firewalls are software that protects your network against attacks by preventing unauthorized users from accessing the Internet.
Therefore, use a firewall to restrict access to specific IP addresses or domains (such as www.example.com). For example, if you want only employees of your company’s IT department to be able to access certain websites on your intranet, create a rule in WAF that blocks all requests from those sites except for those sent by those employees. It will help prevent hackers from gaining unauthorized access through these portals.
Filter Input, Escape Output
The use of regular expressions to filter input `alert(“I am a script”)` is a bad idea. Instead, you should use a more secure method like `javascript: alert(“I am a script”)`. It will prevent attackers from injecting malicious code into your scripts and making them execute when they are loaded on the page.
You can also use HTML special chars() to escape HTML markup inside of your code block so that no attacker can inject exploits into your web application.
Penetration Testing
Penetration testing is a security approach that combines dynamic scanning technologies with human security knowledge. It identifies weaknesses in the security posture of an online application.
Pentesters behave in the same way as genuine threat actors, exploiting vulnerabilities, obtaining illegal access, stealing data, and disrupting services. They do so, however, under a contract with the web application’s owner, within an agreed-upon scope. Meanwhile, their actions at a subconscious level prevent significant harm to the business.
This approach is more difficult to implement than SAST and DAST. Nonetheless, it can reveal extra dangers that automated tools may overlook.
Quality Assurance & Testing
Quality assurance and testing are crucial for eliminating security risks in your web applications. Use the following recommended practices:
- Use static and dynamic scanning—during development, use Static Application Security Testing (SAST), and in production, use Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST).
- Employ penetration testing—for large-scale applications, you may use lightweight penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) solutions, as well as a periodic full-scale penetration test by a trained ethical hacker.
- Adopt CI/CD—whenever you modify your application, push your code through an automated testing process and deploy it automatically to guarantee that security risks are not introduced due to installation errors.
Conclusion
I hope that this blog post has given you some insight into how to secure your web applications. Remember that security is a process, not an endpoint. You should always be on the lookout for new attacks and vulnerabilities. Even if it means testing your application yourself!
