5 Ways to Develop a Secure Web Application

When a website or any other web app developed all the web developer assures you to build a secure a website, but in practice it is not possible to develop a 100% secure website, for anyone. After trying so hard and complex code, there is often some loopholes exist.

There are a numerous benefits of developing a secure website. Some people can crack the code and can use it for the wrong intention. Countless websites are getting hacked by the intruders or hackers on a daily basis. They might do it for the sake of enjoyment or money, and some hackers are also there who hack for good purpose and help to find vulnerabilities.

Although it is not possible to develop a website with complete security or it can say as it is impossible task for a developer, no matter how much experienced he has. But security is the foremost concern which you can‘t overlook. You can’t secure your website by writing a secure PHP code. There are some key points which you can consider while developing a web application and that can help you to provide security.

• Input Validation

  With many applications you already know what kind of data you are expecting in the input. It is a way to protect yourself against the attacks is to make sure the user can enter only appropriate data. By validating an input, it is restricted to entering another kind of value. For example, in birthday field, a user can enter only in DD – MM – YYYY format. A user can’t even try to enter a string or character.

• Protecting from Cross Site Scripting (CSS) Attacks

  A web application accepts some inputs from users that can be in the form of comments, threads, or blog posts in the form of HTML. Accepting the complete HTML can be dangerous from the input. Because it allows JavaScript to be executed, that may cause of cookies hijack. These cookies will allow to an intruder access to the website data.To control it there are some HTML tags or code which you can customize, there is no possible way to execute the JavaScript, it will disallow the formatting. You can allow some BB code or BB tags, which are commonly allowed on forums.

• Protecting The Included Files

  PHP scripts often include the other files that contain code for things like connecting to a database. These files often given an extension .inc by some developers, if an attacker directly accesses these files, he will able to know the database credentials and will access the application’s data. That’s why it is better to use the . php extension for included code files and keep them outside of directories directly accessible by the user.

• Guarding Against SQL Injection – SQL injection is one the most well

  known security attacks. It occurs when the data go unchecked and the application doesn’t escape characters used in strings. By using parameterized queries and prepared statements, you can protect SQL injection.

• Prevent Password Cracking With Salt

  Md5 is a most popular encryption algorithm or function to prevent the password by the PHP developers. It gives the hash straight away. It is a strong prevention, but it can be cracked by using the brute force.

   

  To overcome this problem developers often use “Salt”. To add some more text before hashing it and then do the same user provided password. It will increase the length of the password, hence its complexity. Along with salt it is good practice to use a hash algorithm such as Sha1, Sha2, etc.

All these key points are surely helping you to develop a secure web application. Keeping all these in mind, it may overcome the vulnerabilities.