Best Practices for Security in Web Application Development

Do Web Applications stand the risk of External Attacks?

Web application security is an essential factor in web application development. According to the State Of Application Security, 2020 by Forrester, web application weaknesses and software vulnerabilities are the root cause of most common external attacks. It’s high time to elevate the perceptions in implementing security practices in web application development. The strict establishment of security practices in web application development can solidify web security.

Security Practices in Web Application Development

Design a Plan in Web Application Security

Having a web application security plan is the best strategy to ensure reliability. Even though your web application doesn’t have any history of cyber threats, it’s good to keep a web security plan in the form of blueprints. This move can help to handle cyber hacks on the website and web applications. Before devising web security plans, conduct meetings with the IT security team to mold the web security plan’s exact structure. 

A web security plan should have information about the people who handle web application security and the priority of web applications that need to keep protected. When there is a predicament of cyber attacks for your organization, it’s significant to prioritize which web application should be secured first. 

You can find a sample information security plan here. 

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)

OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities are 

• Injection
• Broken Authentication & Session Management
• Sensitive Data Exposure
• External XML Entities
• Broken Access Controls
• Security Misconfigurations
• Cross-Site Scripting
• Insecure Deserialisation
• Using components with known vulnerabilities
• Insufficient Logging and Monitoring

It’s ideal to use OWASP Dependency-Check to identify disclosed public vulnerabilities in Nodejs.

For securing the backend APIs against the above vulnerabilities we can use Helmet.  By default, Helmet provides the following

• DNS Prefetch
• Hide X-Powered-By 
• HTTP Strict Transport Security 
• NoSniff 
• XSS Protections

Know the Importance of Web Security

It’s vital to implement web security practices for your web applications. You should use web security tools like IBM Security Secret Server to quickly and easily empower your IT security to manage all types of web applications.

Backup Your Website

Undergoing regular backup of your website data is the healthy process that helps you while in cyber threats and data breaches. During web application security attacks, it’s mandatory to restore the previously saved data. This backup method will be beneficial during cyberattacks except for some ransomware attacks.

The major web hosting giants like AWS, Microsoft Azure, SiteGround, and GoDaddy provide website backup options for your CMS and custom made websites. WordPress and many other popular CMS platforms offer inbuilt backup choices. 

Data Encryption

Data encryption is the technique of encrypting your confidential data to avoid unauthorized access. This process doesn’t make any interruption in data transmission and authorizes the right persons to access it. The encryption is hiding sensitive information from outsiders and protects data stored in the database or other storage mediums in web applications.

Microsoft BitLocker, IBM Guardium, and Apple FileVault are the most commonly used data encryption and web security tools worldwide. 

DDoS Protection

Use the following for protecting the resources from DDoS attacks

• Amazon WAF with Amazon API Gateway (here)
• Azure DDoS Protection

Identity & Access Control (AWS)

AWS offers capabilities to define, enforce, and manage user access policies across AWS services. They are:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets you define individual user accounts with permissions across AWS resources.
• AWS provides native identity and access management integration across many of its services plus API integration with any of your own applications or services.

Need help? Perfomatix | Web App Development Company

Perfomatix, one of the top web app development companies, provides web application development services to build the most secure web applications that follow contemporary web application security practices. Get in touch with us to find out how to transform your innovative idea into a working product. Visit our success stories section to find out more about some of the startups making it big with us.