Quick summary: This article presents guidelines for Node.js developers to follow to secure their applications against potential vulnerabilities arising from the use of third-party tools. It complies with essential guidelines, which we will refer to as Node.js security best practices, to ensure the security of Node.js applications.

What is Nodejs?

Node.js is a runtime environment that enables developers to use JavaScript beyond web browsers (or the front end) using various frameworks. It runs on Chrome’s V8 engine, allowing JavaScript developers to apply their skills to back-end development using the same language.

What is Nodejs Security?

While Nodejs is secure itself, it relies on open-source packages as in the fast-paced world, companies and developers do not want to invest their in reinventing the wheel. The packages make development easy and fast. However, this convenience can also introduce vulnerabilities in the application.

NPM, an open-source platform containing over two million packages, serves as a valuable resource by providing millions of packages to JavaScript developers. On the one hand, it makes it easy to use packages. On the other hand, it may pose potential risks.

Node.js developers heavily depend on open-source third-party packages.

In 2021, 77 percent of respondents from the United States report using open source to modernize their IT infrastructure, a report from Statista shows.

Despite the fact that over 78% of organizations make use of open-source projects, only about 40% of organizations use formal security rating tools to assess the security of these packages, while only about 27% of open-source projects are audited on a regular basis, a report reveals.

Like others, Nodejs applications are vulnerable to security breaches. Therefore, it becomes imperative to take the necessary steps to enforce strong security measures.

This article is a compilation of tips and advice from experts on how to secure Node.js applications. However, if you need technical assistance to enforce strong security measures on your existing Nodejs app, you can check out our Nodejs development services. Our team of professional IT experts will thoroughly assess your application for security vulnerabilities.

Best Practices for Nodejs Security

1. Enable Strong Authentication Method

Strong authentication is all about implementing the latest security measures to safeguard sensitive pieces of information. As you know, data breaches are no longer a rarity. They are a daily occurrence, and even the biggest tech companies are not immune. In recent years, Google, Twitter, and other big-name companies have all experienced data breaches that led to them redefining their authentication mechanism. Here are a few methods to be considered:

• Limit login attempts in a fixed period of time.

• Enables mandatory two-factor authentication to access sensitive data and services.

• Enable more than a basic authentication — choose standard authentication methods like OAuth, OpenID, etc.

• Implement strong password policies for user management and operations.

2. Make Use of Security-related plugins

These tools help you identify security weaknesses such as unsafe RegEx, unsafe use of eval(), use of non-literal filenames, etc., in your node applications when you write code. Overall, they can help detect these security flaws easily.

Eslint and Tslint are well-known code analytics tools for JavaScript and TypeScript projects for security checks in Node applications.

An example:

3. Limit concurrent requests

Limiting concurrent requests helps prevent Nodejs applications from being unresponsive due to overwhelming requests at the same time. By using a middleware or balancer, you can limit the number of requests. Ngnix is a widely used service for load balancing; however, you can also make use of middleware express-rate-limiter or rate-limiter-flexible package.

4. Avoid blocking the Event Loop

Nodejs includes EventLoop to run JavaScript code and Worker Pool for intensive tasks, which makes it a scalable platform that can handle too many requests. All incoming requests and outgoing responses flow through the Event Loop.

Node.js leverages V8 (JavaScript engine) for code executions, which is fairly fast for many common operations. However, if callbacks have large complexities or regexp and JSON operations occur in your program, it can lead to Event Loop blocking.

The common issues that may trigger Event Loop blocking are vulnerable regular expressions. Follow the below tips to avoid Event Loop blocking.

• Use asynchronous operation whenever possible. Node can fairly handle asynchronous I/O operations.

• Offload the CPU-intensive tasks to prevent blocking.

• Complex regular expressions can lead to catastrophic backtracking; therefore, keep your regular expressions simple.

• Use promises and async/await

• As described above, middleware can help your performance of various operations efficiency; they can also lead to blocking. Don’t use unnecessary middleware.

• Reduce the complexity of the callbacks.

Read more at https://www.brilworks.com/blog/node-js-security-best-practices/