Web App Security Best Practices: 10 Essential Tips to Boost Security

Quick Summary: Security is a crucial factor when it comes to creating web applications. In this article, you can find the best practices that you can follow for developing secure web applications. These best practices come from experts who have extensive experience in web app security domain. Let’s check out the practices.

Developers often take web application security for granted. This is probably due to their hectic development and deployment cycles that require faster outcomes. So, they tend to deliver web applications that are susceptible to cyberattacks.

Now, the question arises: How can developers build secure web apps while aligning them with their agile principles? The answer is they must focus on creating a strong foundation for their web application to avoid loopholes or vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.

Web application best practices help them build a strong foundation by following certain development practices and tips that boost security. This blog provides a complete web app security checklist of these best practices to help developers create secure applications.

So, let’s unravel the mystery to bolster cybersecurity!

Uncover Security Vulnerabilities Before Hackers with Intelligent Scanning Detect Issues in Minutes

What are Web Application Vulnerabilities?

Vulnerabilities in web applications are loopholes or weaknesses that allow cybercriminals or attackers to manipulate source code, access unauthorized premises, steal sensitive data, or interfere with the operation of the application.

Here, we have noted down the most critical application security risks listed by OWASP Top 10.

SQL Injection: SQL injection used when hackers manipulate the backend database using malicious SQL code. As a result, it can cause unauthorized data listing, table deletion, and unauthorized administrative access.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): Cross-Site Scripting is one of the most prevalent vulnerabilities nowadays. It's an attack targeted at application users. It can be used to fool users or deface a website by injecting Trojans, changing page content, or gaining access to user accounts. The exploitation of XSS against a user can lead to many causes, such as account deletion, privilege escalation, malware injection, account compromise, and many more.

Remote File Inclusion (RFI): Remote file inclusion aims to inject files into a web application server remotely. This exploitation can lead to compromise of the web server, data theft, malicious script and code execution in applications.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): Cross-site request forgery attack forces authenticated users to submit requests or perform unwanted actions to a web application against which they are currently authenticated. This malicious attack can lead to unwanted funds transfer, password changes, or data theft.

There are many other risks and vulnerabilities to web applications like Buffer Overflow, Code Injection, Man-in-the-middle (MITM) Attack, Insecure Deserialization, etc. which can lead to security risks and threats to your organization. However, if you are planning to mitigate such risks and sanitize your application inputs and outputs, there are some best security practices you must implement.

In fact, adopting proven coding practices for your web application development can protect against most vulnerabilities. Incorporating a web application security testing tool throughout every stage of the development life cycle is essential for identifying flaws and addressing vulnerable code effectively.

In addition, before integrating third-party APIs or open-source components, those must be scanned on a daily basis. Because sometimes, they may turn out to be vulnerable to your web application.

Expert Tips: Utilize modern web frameworks as they offer out-of-the-box security techniques to prevent common vulnerabilities like XSS, CSRF, and SQL Injection.

Why Does Web Application Security Matter?

If we look at the statistics, the average cost of data breaches is $4.88 million. Therefore, application security is not something you can ignore. And the number has seen a growth of around 12% over the last five years.

Your web application isn’t just a piece of code. It is the bridge between your business and customers. Any kind of cyber risk not only affects your business but also hampers user experience. Besides, it is a roadblock to smooth business operations and exposes your sensitive data to an unauthorized individual.

There are many tips and methods to secure web applications. However, you will have to take some solid web app vulnerability prevention measures to boost security. Identifying and remediating vulnerabilities helps you mitigate security risks.

The following points describe why web application security is important.

Avoid Reputational Damage

Failing to secure your web application means it becomes an easy target for attackers. Consequently, the attacker will gain unauthorized access to a user’s data in your application. Alternatively, the attacker can exfiltrate the data from your web app. In either case, this potential data breach will drastically affect your reputation.

Maintain User Trust

When you proactively identify web app security risks and mitigate them, you build trust among users. It not only keeps their data secure but also encourages them to increase their engagement. Web app security builds trust that provides many benefits to your business, whether it is about better revenue opportunities or new users.

Ensure Regulatory Compliance

Your web application should comply with various regulations like GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC2, etc. Robust security of your web application can help you align with these regulations and avoid heavy penalties. Failing to comply with these regulations can result in regulatory actions.

Ensure Business Continuity

When your web application is struck by a cyberattack, it disrupts the services. If the attack is DDoS or DoS, the disruption can continue for a longer time and cause more damage. When your web app is down, it costs you both money and reputation. Ensuring robust security of your web app enables you to prevent business disruptions.

Costly Data Breaches

Weak security, like poor session management or improper authentication, allows an attacker to access sensitive data easily. This will lead to data breaches further damaging your reputation and user trust. The cost of data breaches is very high and causes significant financial loss.

Insider Threat

Even if your web application is secure from external threats, it might lack security features to protect against insider threats. It is a kind of security threat that arises within an organization itself when an ex-employee or business partner advertently exposes sensitive data for monetary benefits or revenge. Proper web application security measures for both external and internal threats can strongly fortify your data.

Web Application Security Best Practices

Let’s go through the following best practices to improve the security for your web application development.

1. Utilize Agile Approach to Web App Security

The Agile methodology is one of the finest approaches used by development teams to make your application secure. Since Agile follows a collaborative approach, data security can be measured at every level and improved if required.

With the help of Agile methodology, web application security is considered from the beginning – design phase using a threat assessment model. Here, security experts will scan your web application in order to identify any flaws and vulnerabilities in the application.

The threat modeling team comes with a various set of approaches, followed by questions such as:

• Is sensitive data encrypted at rest and motion?
• Is there a place for a strong password protection policy?
• Do we adhere to the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) and do users have different levels of privilege?
• Does the application perform input validation?

While going for the web application development process, it’s essential to have a checklist. Moreover, it’s also important to schedule a security testing operation along with your plan for design and workflow.

However, it’s quite a difficult, costly, and time-consuming process to go back and mitigate the risks and vulnerabilities once the application is developed and ready to launch. Therefore, the agile approach is a feasible option to secure and test your application throughout the development process.

2. Create a Threat Assessment Model

A threat model is one of the essential steps toward securing your applications. It enables security professionals to find potential threats and vulnerabilities in your applications. As a result, you can prioritize security requirements.

In addition, the comprehensive threat assessment model will give you two answers: What are threats, and how to protect them.

This gives you a clear picture of the number of potential threats and prioritizes them.

Following are some steps to create a threat assessment model for your application:

i. Identify and Value Assets: In threat modeling, pinpoint the data, hardware, software, and resources your application safeguards. After evaluating, you should assess their organizational importance and prioritize accordingly.

ii. Detect Potential Threats: Identify threats such as hacker attacks, insider risks, and physical security issues. Monitor each threat's potential impact on your application and prioritize based on likelihood and severity.

iii. Discover Vulnerabilities: Once you find potential threats, locate vulnerabilities in your application code, network infrastructure, third-party libraries, and user interfaces. Prioritize these vulnerabilities based on their impact on your application's security.

iv. Assess Threat Likelihood: After identifying threats and vulnerabilities, evaluate their probabilities to prioritize and enhance your application's security.

v. Strategies to Mitigate Risks: Develop strategies to address threats and vulnerabilities in your application. Implement access controls, encryption, and security measures to safeguard against potential attacks.

You should know that the threat modeling process is an ongoing process. Hence, it requires continuous assessment to improve your application security based on your threat modeling outcomes.

3. Establish a Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC)

The primary purpose of SSDLC – Secure Software Development Life Cycle is to define the product development process from the security point of view. The entire process ensures that products in their life cycle are:

• Designed, developed, and assessed by security professionals
• Adhered to standard software security best practices to secure an environment
• Delivered to customers with utmost security protocols

SSDLC is relevant to the entire process of creating a new product, spanning from the concept phase through all development activities.

Protect Web Apps from All Cyber Risks with In-depth Security Assessment Start Assessing Web Apps

4. Implement Web Application Security Best Practices from OWASP

Web applications play an important role in users’ daily lives. Hence, organizations must protect their data and reputation. Therefore, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has provided several guidelines for security experts and professionals.

Unfortunately, many organizations still fail to implement these parameters into their development practices.

Let’s go through some of the best practices by OWASP:

Validate User Input: Input validation before processing is essential to prevent vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).

Authentication and Authorization: Incorporate secure password storage, two-factor authentication, and other measures to prevent unauthorized access to your application.

Follow Secure Coding Practices: Use secure coding techniques, avoid insecure functions, and opt for security-reviewed frameworks to prevent buffer overflows and format string vulnerabilities.

Secure Error Messages: Avoid revealing sensitive information and log security events, including failed logins and suspicious activities, for prompt incident detection and response.

Secure Sessions: Use secure session IDs, enforce timeouts, and invalidate sessions on logout or inactivity to prevent unauthorized access and attacks like session hijacking.

Use Robust Encryption: Safeguard data with industry-standard algorithms, key lengths, and secure key protection to prevent unauthorized access or modification by attackers.

Enforce Access Controls: Restrict user permissions to essential tasks and implement controls at all application levels to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive resources.

Regularly Test Security: Use automated vulnerability scanning tools and manual methods for penetration testing and vulnerability scanning to identify and address weaknesses in your application.

Secure Deployment: Use secure protocols, avoid defaults, and configure security settings according to best practices to prevent installation and configuration security risks.

Incident Response Plan: Ensure rapid and effective response to security incidents by maintaining a proven roadmap, with security experts regularly practicing their roles for efficiency.

5. Manage Containers Carefully

Nowadays, many web applications are running on containers using Docker. Hence, you must ensure that your container images are signed with a digital signature tool – Docker Content Trust. However, containers can lead to significant security breaches if they are not appropriately managed.

Follow the given security guidelines:

Trusted Images: When crafting a container, rely on trusted base images and perform vulnerability scans on all images, including your own, before deployment.

Use Secrets: To prevent exposure, avoid saving credentials or sensitive data directly in a container image. Utilize Docker or Kubernetes secrets mechanisms for secure storage.

Avoid Root Access: Never grant root access to containers and steer clear of "privileged container" options in Kubernetes.

Network Segmentation: Limit container access to essential systems, deploy them in a secure subnet, and avoid unnecessary exposure to the Internet.

Expert Tips: Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) service offers security scans for Docker images. It helps you understand potential security issues your private Docker image faces.

6. Use Encryption and Secure Data Storage

Utilize encryption for data security in transit and at rest. Implement protocols like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security) for secure data transmission and implement encryption algorithms like AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) for data storage.

Moreover, there are certain best practices you have to follow to secure your data storage, like regular backing up your data, using secure database configurations, and bifurcating sensitive data from others.

7. Keep Your Application Updated and Patched Regularly

Keep your application secure by regularly installing updates and patches. Instead of tackling issues independently, benefit from existing solutions. However, planning for updates is crucial, ensuring the proper architecture is in place to prevent API compatibility issues when upgrading to new versions.

8. Utilize Technologies for Detection and Prevention

Choosing cutting-edge technologies is the first effective step to defense against file upload threats. You can consider advanced automation features like content disarm and reconstruction, machine learning, sandboxing, and multi-scanning engines.

These technologies automate the scanning and analysis of uploaded files, including emails, attachments, and archives, to detect and prevent malware, zero-day exploits, and other threats.

Enhance file upload security further by ensuring these technologies incorporate artificial intelligence, behavioral analysis, and user behavior analytics. This approach provides greater visibility into the network, detects strange behavior, and proactively prevents potential threats before they can cause harm.

9. Enhance Malware Defense with ICAP

Leverage ICAP (Internet Content Adaptation Protocol) to secure network parameters and prevent malicious file uploads. ICAP enables real-time scanning and analysis, identifying and blocking threats before reaching their destination.

Integrating ICAP with existing devices adds an extra layer of protection, and its content adaptation capabilities allow precise control over data flow. With the help of ICAP, organizations fortify their network against malicious uploads, enhancing overall cybersecurity.

10. Perform Quality Assurance and Testing

Follow the given best security testing practices for your web application.

Use SAST and DAST Methods: Scan your application and its source code for vulnerabilities during development using Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and in production using Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST).

Use Penetration Testing: You can use Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) solutions for large-complex applications.

Implement CI/CD Approach: After updating your application, conduct automated testing and deploy it automatically to prevent security risks resulting from installation issues.

Implement Standard Compliance: Many global organizations adhere to the European Union's GDPR regulation, and applications handling credit card data must comply with the PCI/DSS standard. Verify if there are other applicable compliance standards or regulations for your application and implement the necessary measures.

Web Application Security Checklist

Every web application is exposed to several security vulnerabilities and threats. Therefore, it’s essential to safeguard your application by maintaining and upgrading it regularly. Here is a checklist we have defined to prevent security threats. Let’s consider and implement them.

• Monitor and understand security risks and threats.
• Establish a threat assessment model before the design phase.
• Create a roadmap for security and create your own preventative measures in advance.
• Keep a record of the vulnerabilities and define steps on how to fix them.
• Prioritize user requirements.
• Keep database encryption and access control separate. Data should never be kept in storage with encryption keys present.
• To strengthen your security against attacks, develop secure data transmission mechanisms.
• Verify passwords and other important data/input fields.
• Create specific interfaces and incorporate microservices, third-party libraries, and APIs.
• Develop a software update cycle using different methodologies.

Discover All Vulnerabilities with Zero False Positives and Prevent Cyberattacks Uncover Weaknesses

How ZeroThreat Ensures Web Application Security?

With the higher probability of cyberattacks on web applications, it’s vital to take a proactive approach to protect your web apps. As a matter of fact, the data breach investigation report by Verizon shows web apps are a major target of external attacks. That’s the reason your organization must mitigate the impact of these threats on your business and web applications.

Luckily, implementing the web app security measures discussed in this blog can help you avoid cyber risks and protect your sensitive data. In this process web app security testing tool – ZeroThreat plays a vital role that simplifies the process of identifying and resolving security issues.

As a powerful DAST tool, it offers continuous vulnerability scanning and generates comprehensive test reports that minimize remediation time. It enables your development team to take prompt actions by prioritizing vulnerabilities based on criticality detecting them with near-zero false positives.

So, what are you waiting for now? Take a free test drive and secure your web apps without any configuration or technical hindrance, just click and test in minutes.