Securing your code cannot be emphasized enough, in recent times, a single vulnerability in your code can expose you, your business and/or customers to malicious attacks, or the bad guys can gain unauthorised access to your data.
So, developers need to follow secure coding practices. By writing secure code, you can help protect your applications from cyberattacks and keep your users' data safe.
In this post, we'll briefly discuss some of these best practices.
1. Validate and sanitize all input data.
This is one of the most important things you can do to secure your code. By validating and sanitizing all input data, you can prevent attackers from injecting malicious code into your application. Such attacks include SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS)
Input validation involves checking the input to make sure that it is in the expected format and type. For example, you should check that email addresses are in a valid format and that phone numbers are numeric etc.
Input sanitization involves removing any malicious characters from the input. For example, you should remove HTML tags and JavaScript from user input.
2. Multi-factor authentication
You should implement strong multi-factor authentication where applicable. This adds an extra layer of security to authenticate and authorize the user.
3. Use secure communication protocols.
When transmitting data over networks, it is important to use secure communication protocols, such as HTTPS/TLS. This will encrypt the data and protect it from malicious attackers, even if they are able to see the encrypted data they won't be able to make sense of it.
4. Implement proper error handling.
It is important to implement proper error-handling mechanisms in your code. This will
You should provide informative error messages to users without revealing underlying system details. You should also avoid logging sensitive information in error messages.
5. Securely store sensitive data.
When storing sensitive data, such as passwords or personally identifiable information (PII), you should encrypt it using a strong encryption algorithm. You should also ensure that your database configurations and backup processes maintain the same level of security.
6. Regularly update and patch your code.
Chances are you have a few dependencies your code works with. Do well to follow updates made to the dependencies and apply them to your code regularly.
7. Hide sensitive data
You should not return sensitive data the client doesn't need to the client, be sure to use DTOs so you have a custom object that only has what the client needs from the response. Anyone can inspect elements on the browser these days and see your network calls.
Conclusion
By following these best practices, developers can significantly reduce the risk of security breaches and build more resilient and secure applications.
This not not an exhaustive list of all best practices, to do some further research you can check the OWASP Secure Coding Practices Quick Reference Guide, it's an amazing source of information on best practices in securing your code.