An Ultimate Guide to Web Application Security

Nowadays, web developers have to be vigilant as cyberattacks are on the rise. The security of their web app must be their top priority. The concept of web application security covers a large array of practices ranging from secure coding to penetration testing.

But before web development, it becomes necessary for you to gain a basic understanding of common vulnerabilities that exist in an app, how to recognize threats and how to implement countermeasures.

This article sheds some light on what makes your web app vulnerable and how to fix it before it gets exploited. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to create a robust application with fewer security flaws. This blog also acts as a guide for companies that are struggling to comply with app security or just want to get a good grasp on the subject.

What is Web App Security?

The measures you take to ensure the security of your applications, websites and APIs against cyberattacks are called web application security. With a common goal of providing robust protection to the business against data theft, cyber vandalism, and other security threats, a large number of topics are involved in this concept.

In the age of globalization and the internet, your web apps are prone to all kinds of attacks. Therefore, you have to use various security practices and techniques to safeguard different aspects of your software system.

Types of Web Application Security

As the volatility of the digital landscape increases, it becomes more important than ever before to protect your web applications. And in light of the recent surges in cyberattacks on large government and business organizations, understanding and implementing security measures has become the top priority.

In this section, we are going to discuss various types of web application security as well as what kind of role they play in guaranteeing to protect your data and providing a safe online experience.

1. Authentication and Access Control

If you easily give out access to your application to anyone or everyone, it would be doomed to get compromised. But if you restrict the access to sensitive data and specific actions in your app to a limited few, then those only with proper authorization can gain entry.

Some of the most commonly used authentication techniques are passwords, biometrics, two-factor authentication and more. Whereas access control mechanisms such as Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) or Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) can restrict the privileges of the user as per predefined rules.

2. Secure Coding Practices

To ensure that the finished product is up to the industry standards, it is recommended to follow best practices in web app development. This allows the web application to withstand common exploits, and vulnerabilities including buffer overflows, SQL injection, XSS and more.

So, implementing secure coding practices like proper error handling, output encoding, and input validation helps developers reduce security risks. It enables you to build a secure web application.

3. Encryption

To protect your sensitive app data on the internet, one of the most useful web app security strategies you can apply is encryption. It uses algorithms to convert your plain text into ciphertext.

In addition to encrypting the data during the transit, it establishes secure connections between web servers and users with SSL/TLS protocols. Encryption is very helpful in protecting your sensitive information that is stored away in files or databases.

4. Security Testing

Apart from integrating security in designing and developing processes, security testing is an integral aspect of the software life cycle.

Security testing includes assessing the code, configurations and infrastructure of your app for potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

Some of the common security testing techniques involve code reviews, vulnerability scans, and penetration tests. In addition to detecting flaws, these methods are also helpful in providing necessary remedies and solutions as well.

5. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Web application firewalls (WAFs) are used to protect your apps against different types of cyberattacks like DDoS, XSS, SQL injection and more. These firewalls monitor the incoming web traffic for harmful requests. Upon finding any, it is filtered before it can reach the app server.

So, it is just another security barrier that guards your application against attackers by blocking malicious traffic. This reduces the security risks significantly.

6. Session Management

To provide a secure environment for your web app to function in, you need to consider session management. This secure environment will monitor the user sessions with the intent of protecting the app from any kind of breaches or tampering from third parties.

Strategies like session expiration, secure storage, ID regeneration and more are employed to mitigate security attacks like session fixation amplification attacks that are targeted specifically towards user sessions.

7. Security Incident Monitoring and Response

To mitigate potential cyberattacks, it is important to monitor all the security-related incidents and threats against the app. Real-time visibility of possible threats is provided by SIEM systems with the help of log analysis.

On top of that, organizations need to prepare incident response plans that consist of a proactive monitoring strategy. Such strategies help them detect and resolve security incidents as soon as they occur.

Web application security best practices

1. Use frameworks and libraries that prioritize security

A lot of web development languages, libraries and frameworks are available in the market for web development. It is highly recommended that you pick the ones that are suitable for your project but also reliable and secure. You also have to keep them updated with time.

2. Secure access to a database

As we talked about one type of web app security, the connection between the database and the app needs to be secure. Access should be provided after two-factor authentication. And it must be recommended to the authorized personnel to use a strong password. It makes sure that your data transmission is protected.

3. Encode and escape data

The practice of encoding and escaping data is very helpful in foiling cross-site scripting attacks. In an XSS attack, the app sends untrusted and unverified data to the database. That data contains XSS detrimental code which sometimes also uses a session cookie.

Encoding tokens like Cross-Site Request Forgery tokens are used to protect your app’s code against XSS attacks.

4. Input Validation

It is necessary to check out the inputs for whether they are secure and properly formatted before they are allowed into the information system workflow. Allowing any malformed input into the database can compromise its integrity. Therefore, validation checks are needed for the data that comes from untrusted sources.

5. Using digital identities

Before allowing the users to use the application, it is necessary to create their digital identity. To build this identity, they first need to verify their authorization. It's a part of creating a digital account. To secure the identification of the users, techniques like cryptographic-based authentication (CBA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) are employed. Adhering to this security practice can help mitigate the risks of hacking.

6. Enforcing access controls

It is recommended here that you configure your access controls. All the requests made to the app, may it be to a server or database or else, must undergo access control. Status like ‘deny’ and ‘least privileged’ should be used. Hardcoding credentials are not permitted.

To control unauthorized access attempts, it is advised that you log every case of authentication and authorization. You can ensure secure access to your web application with the help of secret managers like Hashicorp Vault and AWS Secrets Manager.

7. Protect your data

Your application’s data needs protection. It should be your priority. You have to design a secure mechanism that can keep it safe. You might have to encrypt your data during its transit and rest.

But you don't need to encrypt all of your data. Doing that would slow down your data transmission and overload the web application. Instead, you have to pick the most important sets of data and encrypt them.

8. Secure logging

In multiple best practices before, we talked about keeping logs. It is a simple yet helpful task that can help you secure your app. But you also have to keep your logs secure. You have to store them in a protected place. Many store them in the cloud. It helps track all the API activities.

You can also make them read-only. Just centralize the filtering of the logs. When you are configuring the logs, you should ensure that your credentials and sensitive data are stored securely.

9. Handle errors and exceptions

In some instances, the app shows error messages and they are of different kinds. For example, your connection is lost. The message you show to the users in the case of an error should be clear and concise. On top of that, you should also secure your error handling because a leak in that might eventually lead to a system shutdown.

Final Thoughts

Online markets are becoming increasingly vulnerable. It is tough to say through what means an attack might be projected towards your web application.

Therefore, you have to fortify every weak aspect of your web app by putting strategies like strong passwords, firewalls, SSL certificates, staff education and more in place. In short, you have to ensure that your app doesn't have an opening for hackers to exploit.

In addition to that, knowing the ins and outs of the technologies is a priority. Because attackers nowadays are using modern technologies in their attacks such as SQL injection, DNS spoofing, CSRF, XSS and more.

Developers, users and product owners must be aware of different types of attacks that could compromise the security of the web app. They must know how these attacks work and what the repercussions will be.

But you can avoid them by instilling different types of web application security and adhering to security best practices.