Since the advent of web applications, security experts raised their voices regarding the vulnerabilities in web applications. And unfortunately, the concerns are becoming real. Today the news of a website or web application are getting hacked are everywhere. Underground forums such as Reddit, BuzzFeed or most of the time in the dark web, black hat hackers are sharing web application vulnerabilities to the masses to bring businesses into their knees. No matter what you do, you won’t be able to secure your application 100%. Even a trillion-dollar company like Apple gets hacked. Even NASA does!
However, hops haven’t lost yet. We have prepared this blog to help you recognize the security of your application holistically and give you a range of ways to guarantee that it’s as secure as it can be, as well as always improving. Let’s start with number one.
Query parameterisation: SQL Injection is a nightmare for many web application development companies throughout the world. The security firm has found that SQL Injection can steal the password. The government website, social networking website already has fallen victims many times. As per the recent report, more than 7 % of all websites contains SQL Injection. While many claims to be this comes from directly from the vendor, but the problem lies in the development side instead. As codes could potentially be stolen, wiped, modified, or even used to run malicious operating system commands against your database.
The best way to resolve this vulnerability lies with the programming technique known as Query Parameterisation.
Secure password storage: How does your application storing the password? Hopefully not as text! Today, even standard hashing algorithms like MD5 are failing due to the mass availability of inexpensive computing resources and tools like rainbow tables which can target modest strength passwords and decipher them in almost real-time! The use of rainbow tables has reduced significantly and the reason is the black hat hackers have migrated to more sophisticated attacks like a high-speed dictionary attack which can be launched from a basic home computer.
If high-speed dictionary attacks feel a really sophisticated one, then how about 25 billion attempts per second to crack the password? Though the process may sound like a sci-fi story from a great novel, it’s happening. Hackers are utilizing home PC and building GPU cracking rigs which have sufficient power to execute more than 25 billion attempts per second against stored passwords. If you really want to safeguard the password from these types of malicious attacks, we would recommend you use a one-way algorithm, use a salt, and use an algorithm that is slow to stop GPU cracking rigs and similar attacks. The SCRYPT and PBKDF2 are great examples that can be used to safely store the credential as well.
Usage of HTTP headers: The HTTP headers are a problematic child! The reason behind this is that it is quite easy to manipulate the data here. Yes, they do offer some features. However, take note, you can never depend on this particular practice to offer security, For instance, the REFERER header can show the page redirecting to the transaction and this URLs can be manipulated to redirect into any malicious directory. Whenever you have to use a header, make sure it is perfectly encrypted. Although it is better to skip the entire header part, however, if it’s been placed securely, they do delay the constant hacking attempt initiated by malicious users. For example, if you can use the REFERER to disqualify some requests from outside the site, the malicious attacker has to work around and they have to spend more time to overcome the obstacle.
Encryption: Encryption is the key aspect of offering the best security to the users. You can make use of the SSL certificate to encrypt the data stream completely. If your web application does bank transactions, every step must be secured with SSL. However, don’t rely completely on SSL alone. Take absolute steps in order to safeguard each and every process of the transaction. As one of the best web development company in Delhi, India, we would also want to suggest that never make use of IP address in the URL, instead use the hostname to secure the application. In addition to securing the data stream with SSL, it is crucial that you encrypt particular fields in the HTML forms and manage the URLs within the pages.
Out of the above options, the main way to safeguard your application by joining hands with the team. Yes, there will be some time when you have to fix a visible problem instantly. However, the application will grow and it would be difficult to deal with in terms of security. Putting the best web application practice in the place and working with the best web application development team will definitely help to reduce the vulnerability footprint.
