How to Prevent Web Application Security Vulnerabilities

Almost every business today relies on some form of web application to conduct daily operations. As a result, web application security is more important than ever. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t realize the importance of security until it’s too late. According to Forrester Research, 42% of the companies had experienced external attacks last year. In this post, we’ll discuss five common web application security vulnerabilities and how to prevent them. Let’s get started!

Software development company.

Invest in an SSL certificate:

Web application security is an essential part of protecting data and web applications. It is the foundation for ensuring that data is safe, customer information is secure, and systems are up-to-date. Many SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates can add robust security options to websites. Using SSL certificates can help ensure that critical data cannot be compromised or stolen by hackers and online thieves. In the year 2021, more than 46 million websites will use SSL.

One way SSL certificates can bolster a website’s defenses includes adding common encryption types such as SHA2 and RSA to a domain name and its corresponding server(s). These additional SSL certificate features work with user browsers like Internet Explorer (IE), Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, etc. 

If you are searching for the perfect inexpensive yet premium SSL certs, we recommend going for Comodo SSL certificates or those from RapidSSL and AlphaSSL. From the house of reputed Certificate Authorities (CAs), they offer unmatched encryption at pocket-friendly prices!

Web Application security:

Web Application security is an important topic that must be understood and implemented on every website. Most users often forget that all websites (including this one) are software applications designed by humans to live on the internet. Even though they have been coded with top-of-the-line functionalities, most developers tend to neglect the importance of additional layers of security for their web applications, leaving them vulnerable to unauthorized access/code injection from attackers. This article will explain the 5 common web application vulnerabilities that many web apps suffer from and how you can prevent them in your code.

  • SQL Injection 

SQL injection attacks are among the most common application layer attack and target applications that build dynamic queries based on user input. Since these queries are not built with security in mind, attackers can inject their malicious code into the server to be executed. There are different injection attacks, but we’ll focus on SQL Injection as it is generally regarded as a “classic” vulnerability.

HTTPS is used by almost 95% of the websites on Google. SQL injection is possible whenever an application builds a database query based on user input (which could come from HTTP requests or HTML forms). Thus every application must use parameterized queries for all database interactions to ensure that no unintended commands or characters get injected into the database. Using this strategy, you should be able to safely build complex database queries without worrying about SQL injection vulnerabilities.

  •  Broken Authentication 

Broken authentication refers to the insecure implementation of login where certain components are missing or misconfigured. Broken authentication often occurs when developers don’t follow best practices for their framework code or forget to configure an important parameter when implementing login functionality. In other words, when a web server lets attackers authenticate with nothing but the username and password (while making them prove they know the correct credentials), it’s breaking authentication security.

Poor application design is made evident when you notice that directory traversal vulnerabilities occur in a section closely related to a sensitive function such as ‘login.’ This means that instead of going straight to the login page via HTTP requests, you can directly access pages under /admin/ without being logged in, which makes your servers accessible by anyone who knows the URL paths. The solution here is simple, always verify that users are authenticated before allowing them access to any pages with sensitive information.

  •  Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) 

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is an attack that allows attackers to execute scripts (e.g., JavaScript) in the victim’s browser, which the client will automatically trust due to the nature of the site. XSS is one of the most common web application security exploits on the internet even today; you must validate user input appropriately before displaying it on your website. XSS vulnerabilities are normally caused by not validating/encoding user input on your web application before displaying it on another page or confirming it via AJAX requests. These types of attacks leave users exposed to session hijacking, keylogging, phishing, and many other attacks once malicious code has been injected into a vulnerable page.

  •  Session Manipulation

Session manipulation vulnerabilities are often found in web applications that do not properly authenticate users or use encrypted session tokens (instead of managing sessions with cookies). These types of vulnerabilities allow attackers to “take over” a victim’s session without actually knowing their credentials. Although this type of attack is often more difficult to accomplish, some attackers still go after these vulnerabilities because many developers neglect to secure their sessions by using strong encryption standards (e.g., AES-256) and hashing algorithms (e.g., SHA512). You can avoid session issues by not implementing random session IDs that can be guessed or manipulated through brute force attacks, protecting yourself with SSL/TLS during transmission, and using well-implemented hashing algorithms.

  •  Sensitive Data Exposure 

Sensitive data exposure occurs when user information is sent without proper encryption to the client for display. This could be because developers didn’t follow best practices for their framework code or forgot to properly encrypt private data before displaying it on various pages of an application. For example, you should never store credit card numbers in clear text on your server because anyone at any time could gain access to these records if they know where to look (e.g., through logs). The solution here is simple; always follow best practices when writing your web application code, especially in encrypting sensitive information before it’s sent to a user.

When developing web applications, you’ll encounter many security vulnerabilities that require knowledge of best practices when writing your source code or configuring your servers.

Conclusion:

There are many ways to prevent these common web application security vulnerabilities. If you have any questions, please get in touch with us at your convenience! We would be happy to provide more information on this topic or even set up a consultation with our team of experts.