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A practical security guide for web developers (Work in progress)

The intended audience

Security issues happen for two reasons -

  1. Developers who have just started and cannot really tell a difference between using MD5 or bcrypt.
  2. Developers who know stuff but forget/ignore them.

Our detailed explanations should help the first type while we hope our checklist helps the second one create more secure systems. This is by no means a comprehensive guide, it just covers stuff based on the most common issues we have discovered in the past.

Contents

  1. The Security Checklist
  2. Ecommerce Security CheckList
  3. What can go wrong?
  4. Securely transporting stuff: HTTPS explained
  5. Authentication: I am who I say I am
    5.1 Form based authentication
    5.2 Basic authentication
    5.3 One is not enough, 2 factor, 3 factor, ....
    5.4 Why use insecure text messages? Introducing HOTP & TOTP
    5.5 Handling password resets
  6. Authorization: What am I allowed to do?
    6.1 Token based Authorization
    6.2 OAuth & OAuth2
    6.3 JWT
  7. Data Validation and Sanitation: Never trust user input
    7.1 Validating and Sanitizing Inputs
    7.2 Sanitizing Outputs
    7.3 Cross Site Scripting
    7.4 Injection Attacks
    7.5 User uploads
    7.6 Tamper-proof user inputs
  8. Plaintext != Encoding != Encryption != Hashing
    8.1 Common encoding schemes
    8.2 Encryption
    7.3 Hashing & One way functions
    8.4 Hashing speeds cheatsheet
  9. Passwords: dadada, 123456 and cute@123
    9.1 Password policies
    9.2 Storing passwords
    9.3 Life without passwords
  10. Public Key Cryptography
  11. Sessions: Remember me, please
    11.1 Where to save state?
    11.2 Invalidating sessions
    11.3 Cookie monster & you
  12. Fixing security, one header at a time
    12.1 Secure web headers
    12.2 Data integrity check for 3rd party code
    12.3 Certificate Pinning
  13. Configuration mistakes
    13.1 Provisioning in cloud: Ports, Shodan & AWS
    13.2 Honey, you left the debug mode on
    13.3 Logging (or not logging)
    13.4 Monitoring
    13.5 Principle of least privilege
    13.6 Rate limiting & Captchas
    13.7 Storing project secrets and passwords in a file
    13.8 DNS: Of subdomains and forgotten pet-projects
    13.9 Patching & Updates
  14. Attacks: When the bad guys arrive
    14.1 Clickjacking
    14.2 Cross Site Request Forgery
    14.3 Denial of Service
    14.4 Server Side Request Forgery
  15. Stats about vulnerabilities discovered in Internet Companies
  16. On reinventing the wheel, and making it square
    16.1 Security libraries and packages for Python
    16.2 Security libraries and packages for Node/JS
    16.3 Learning resources
  17. Maintaining a good security hygiene
  18. Security Vs Usability
  19. Back to Square 1: The Security Checklist explained

Who are we?

We are full stack developers who just grew tired of watching how developers were lowering the barrier to call something a hack by writing unsecure code. In the past six months, we have prevented leaks of more than 15 million credit card details, personal details of over 45 million users and potentially saved companies from shutting down. Recently, we discovered an issue that could result in system takeover and data leak in a bitcoin institution. We have helped several startups secure their systems, most of them for free, sometimes without even getting a thank you in response :)

If you disagree with something or find a bug please open an issue or file a PR. Alternatively, you can talk to us on [email protected]