The topic of security covers many different facets within the SDLC. From focusing on secure application design to designing systems to protect computers, data, and networks against potential attacks, it is clear that security should be top of mind for all developers. This Zone provides the latest information on application vulnerabilities, how to incorporate security earlier in your SDLC practices, data governance, and more.
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In today's digital world, mobile apps play a crucial role in our daily lives. They serve a range of purposes from transactions and online shopping to social interactions and work efficiency, making them essential. However, with their widespread use comes an increased risk of security threats. Ensuring the security of an app requires an approach from development methods to continuous monitoring. Prioritizing security is key to safeguarding your users and upholding the trustworthiness of your app. Remember, security is an ongoing responsibility rather than a one-time task. Stay updated on emerging risks. Adjust your security strategies accordingly. The following sections discuss the importance of security measures and outline the steps for developing a mobile app. What Is Mobile App Security and Why Does It Matter? Mobile app security involves practices and precautions to shield apps from vulnerabilities, attacks, and unauthorized entry. It encompasses elements such as data safeguarding, authentication processes, authorization mechanisms, secure coding principles, and encryption techniques. The Significance of Ensuring Mobile App Security User Trust: Users expect their personal information to be kept safe when using apps. A breach would damage trust and reputation. Compliance With Laws and Regulations: Most countries have laws to protect data such as GDPR, which organizations are required to adhere to. Not following these regulations could result in penalties. Financial Consequences: Security breaches can lead to losses to costs, compensations, and recovery efforts. Sustaining Business Operations: A compromised app has the potential to disrupt business functions and affect revenue streams. Guidelines for Developing a Secure Mobile App Creating an application entails various crucial steps aimed at fortifying the app against possible security risks. The following is a detailed roadmap for constructing an app. 1. Recognize and Establish Security Requirements Prior to commencing development, outline the security prerequisites specific to your app. Take into account aspects like authentication, data storage, encryption, and access management. 2. Choose a Reliable Cloud Platform Choose a cloud service provider that offers security functionalities. Popular choices may include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 3. Ensure Safe Development Practices • Educate developers on coding methods to steer clear of vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and insecure APIs. • Conduct routine code reviews to detect security weaknesses at an early stage. 4. Implement Authentication and Authorization Measures • Employ robust authentication methods like factor authentication (MFA) for heightened user login security. • Utilize Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to assign permissions based on user roles limiting access to functionalities. 5. Safeguard Data Through Encryption • Utilize HTTPS for communication between the application and server for in-transit encryption. • Encrypt sensitive data stored in databases or files for at-rest encryption. 6. Ensure the Security of APIs • Validate input by employing API keys. Set up rate limiting for API security. • Securely handle user authentication and authorization with OAuth and OpenID Connect protocols. 7. Conduct Regular Security Assessments • Perform penetration testing periodically to identify vulnerabilities. • Leverage automated scanning tools to detect security issues efficiently. 8. Monitor Activities and Respond to Incidents • Keep track of behavior in time to spot any irregularities or anomalies promptly. Having a plan for handling security incidents is crucial. What Is Involved in Mobile Application Security Testing? Implementing robust security testing methods is crucial for ensuring the integrity and resilience of mobile applications. Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), and Mobile App Penetration Testing are fundamental approaches that help developers identify and address security vulnerabilities. These methodologies not only fortify the security posture of apps but also contribute to maintaining user trust and confidence. Let's delve deeper into each of these testing techniques to understand their significance in securing mobile apps effectively. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) This method involves identifying security vulnerabilities in applications during the development stage. It entails examining the application's source code or binary without executing it, which helps detect security flaws in the development process. SAST scans the codebase for vulnerabilities like injection flaws, authentication, insecure data storage, and other typical security issues. Automated scanning tools are used to analyze the code and pinpoint problems such as hardcoded credentials, improper input validation, and exposure of data. By detecting security weaknesses before deployment, SAST allows developers to make necessary improvements to enhance the application's security stance. Integrating SAST into the development workflow aids in meeting industry standards and regulatory mandates. In essence, SAST strengthens mobile application resilience against cyber threats by protecting information and upholding user confidence in today's interconnected environment. Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) This method is used to test the security of apps while they are running, assessing their security in time. Unlike analysis that looks at the app's source code, DAST evaluates how the app behaves in a setting. DAST tools emulate real-world attacks by interacting with the app as a user would, sending different inputs and observing the reactions. By analyzing how the app operates during runtime, DAST can pinpoint security issues such as injection vulnerabilities, weak authentication measures, and improper error handling. DAST mainly focuses on uncovering vulnerabilities that may not be obvious from examining the code. Some common techniques used in DAST include fuzz testing, where the app is bombarded with inputs to reveal vulnerabilities, and penetration testing conducted by hackers to exploit security flaws. By using DAST, developers can detect vulnerabilities that malicious actors could exploit to compromise an app's confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data. Integrating DAST into mobile app development allows developers to find and fix security weaknesses before deployment, thereby reducing the chances of security breaches and strengthening application security. Mobile App Penetration Testing This proactive approach is employed to pinpoint weaknesses and vulnerabilities in apps. Simulating real-world attacks is part of assessing the security stance of an application and its underlying infrastructure. Penetration tests can be conducted manually by cybersecurity experts or automated using specialized tools and software. The testing procedure includes several phases: Reconnaissance: Gather details about the application's structure, features, and possible attack paths. Vulnerability Scanning: Use automated tools to pinpoint security vulnerabilities in the app. Exploitation: Attempt to exploit identified vulnerabilities to gain entry or elevate privileges. Post-Exploitation: Document the consequences of breaches and offer recommendations for mitigation. Mobile App Penetration Testing helps organizations uncover and rectify security weaknesses and reduces the risk of data breaches, financial harm, and damage to reputation. By evaluating the security of their apps, companies can enhance their security standing and maintain the confidence of their clients. By combining the above methodologies, Mobile App Security Testing helps identify and rectify security vulnerabilities in the development process, ensuring that mobile apps are strong, resilient, and protected against cybersecurity risks. This helps safeguard user data and maintain user trust in today's interconnected world. Common Mobile App Security Threats Data Leakage Data leakage refers to the unauthorized exposure of sensitive information stored or transmitted via mobile apps. This poses significant risks for both individuals and companies, including identity theft, financial scams, damage to reputation, and legal ramifications. For individuals, data leaks can compromise details such as names, addresses, social security numbers, and financial information, impacting their privacy and security. Moreover, leaks of health or personal data can tarnish someone's reputation and well-being. On the business front, data leaks can result in financial losses, regulatory fines, and erosion of customer trust. Breaches involving customer data can harm a company's image, leading to customer loss, which can affect revenue and competitiveness. Failure to secure sensitive information can also lead to severe consequences and penalties, especially in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, or e-commerce. Therefore, implementing robust security measures is crucial to protect information and maintain user trust in mobile apps. Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) Attacks Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) Attacks happen when someone secretly intercepts and alters communication between two parties. In the context of apps, this involves a hacker inserting themselves between a user's device and the server, allowing them to spy on shared information. MITM attacks are risky, potentially leading to data theft and identity fraud as hackers can access login credentials, financial transactions, and personal data. To prevent MITM attacks, developers should use encryption methods such as HTTPS/TLS, while users should avoid public Wi-Fi networks and consider using VPNs for added security. Remaining vigilant and taking precautions are essential in protecting against MITM attacks. Injection Attacks Injection attacks pose significant security risks to apps as malicious actors exploit vulnerabilities to insert and execute unauthorized code. Common examples include SQL injection and JavaScript injection. During these attacks, perpetrators tamper with input fields to inject commands, gaining unauthorized access to data or disrupting app functions. Injection attacks can lead to data breaches, data tampering, and system compromise. To prevent these attacks, developers should enforce input validation, use secure queries, and adhere to secure coding practices. Regular security assessments and tests are crucial for pinpointing and addressing vulnerabilities in apps. Insecure Authentication Insecure authentication methods can lead to vulnerabilities, opening the door to entry and data breaches. Common issues include weak passwords, absence of two-factor authentication, and improper session management. Cyber attackers exploit these weaknesses to impersonate users, access data unlawfully, or seize control of user accounts. This compromised authentication system jeopardizes user privacy, data accuracy, and accessibility, posing risks to individuals and organizations. To address this risk, developers should implement security measures such as two-factor authentication and session tokens. Regular updates and enhancements to security protocols are crucial to stay ahead of evolving threats. Data Storage Ensuring secure data storage is crucial in today's technology landscape, especially for apps. It's vital to protect sensitive information and financial records to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches. Secure data storage includes encrypting information both at rest and in transit using encryption methods and secure storage techniques. Moreover, setting up access controls, authentication procedures, and conducting regular security checks are essential to uphold the confidentiality and integrity of stored data. By prioritizing these data storage practices and security protocols, developers can ensure that user information remains shielded from risks and vulnerabilities. Faulty Encryption Faulty encryption and flawed security measures can lead to vulnerabilities within apps, putting sensitive data at risk of unauthorized access and misuse. If encryption algorithms are weak or not implemented correctly, encrypted data could be easily decoded by actors. Poor key management, like storing encryption keys insecurely, worsens these threats. Additionally, security protocols lacking proper authentication or authorization controls create opportunities for attackers to bypass security measures. The consequences of inadequate encryption and security measures can be substantial and can include data breaches, financial losses, and a decline in user trust. To address these risks effectively, developers should prioritize encryption algorithms, secure management practices, and thorough security protocols in their mobile apps. The Unauthorized Use of Device Functions The misuse of device capabilities within apps presents a security concern, putting user privacy and device security at risk. Malicious apps or attackers could exploit weaknesses to access features like the camera, microphone, or GPS without permission leading to privacy breaches. This unauthorized access may result in monitoring, unauthorized audio/video recording, and location tracking, compromising user confidentiality. Additionally, unauthorized use of device functions could allow attackers to carry out activities such as sending premium SMS messages or making calls that incur costs or violate privacy. To address this issue effectively, developers should enforce permission controls. Carefully evaluate third-party tools and integrations to prevent misuse of device capabilities. Reverse Engineering and Altering Code Altering the code within apps can pose security risks and put the app's integrity and confidentiality at risk. Bad actors might decompile the code to find weaknesses, extract data, or alter its functions for malicious purposes. These activities allow attackers to bypass security measures, insert malicious code, or create vulnerabilities leading to data breaches, unauthorized access, and financial harm. Moreover, tampering with code can enable hackers to circumvent licensing terms or protections for developers' intellectual property, impacting their revenue streams. To effectively address this threat, developers should employ techniques like code obfuscation to obscure the code's meaning and make it harder for attackers to decipher. They should also establish safeguards during the app's operation and regularly audit the codebase for any signs of tampering or unauthorized modifications. These proactive measures help mitigate the risks associated with code alteration and maintain the app's security and integrity. Third-Party Collaborations Third-party collaborations in apps bring both advantages and risks. While connecting with third-party services can improve features and user satisfaction, it also exposes the app to security threats and privacy issues. Thoroughly evaluating third-party partners, following security protocols, and regularly monitoring are steps to manage these risks. Neglecting to assess third-party connections can lead to data breaches, compromised user privacy, and harm to the app's reputation. Therefore, developers should be cautious and diligent when entering into collaborations with parties to safeguard the security and credibility of their apps. Social Manipulation Strategies Social manipulation strategies present a security risk for apps leveraging human behavior to mislead users and jeopardize their safety. Attackers can use methods like emails deceptive phone calls or misleading messages to deceive users into sharing sensitive data like passwords or financial information. Moreover, these tactics can influence user actions like clicking on links or downloading apps containing malware. Such strategies erode user trust and may lead to data breaches, identity theft, or financial scams. To address this, it's important for users to understand social manipulation tactics and be cautious when dealing with suspicious requests, messages, or links in mobile apps. Developers should also incorporate security measures like two-factor authentication and anti-phishing tools to safeguard users against engineering attacks. Conclusion Always keep in mind that security is an ongoing responsibility and not a one-time job. Stay informed about threats and adapt your security measures accordingly. Developing an app can be crucial for safeguarding user data establishing trust and averting security breaches.
If your system is facing an imminent security threat—or worse, you’ve just suffered a breach—then logs are your go-to. If you’re a security engineer working closely with developers and the DevOps team, you already know that you depend on logs for threat investigation and incident response. Logs offer a detailed account of system activities. Analyzing those logs helps you fortify your digital defenses against emerging risks before they escalate into full-blown incidents. At the same time, your logs are your digital footprints, vital for compliance and auditing. Your logs contain a massive amount of data about your systems (and hence your security), and that leads to some serious questions: How do you handle the complexity of standardizing and analyzing such large volumes of data? How do you get the most out of your log data so that you can strengthen your security? How do you know what to log? How much is too much? Recently, I’ve been trying to use tools and services to get a handle on my logs. In this post, I’ll look at some best practices for using these tools—how they can help with security and identifying threats. And finally, I’ll look at how artificial intelligence may play a role in your log analysis. How To Identify Security Threats Through Logs Logs are essential for the early identification of security threats. Here’s how: Identifying and Mitigating Threats Logs are a gold mine of streaming, real-time analytics, and crucial information that your team can use to its advantage. With dashboards, visualizations, metrics, and alerts set up to monitor your logs you can effectively identify and mitigate threats. In practice, I’ve used both Sumo Logic and the ELK stack (a combination of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash). These tools can help your security practice by allowing you to: Establish a baseline of behavior and quickly identify anomalies in service or application behavior. Look for things like unusual access times, spikes in data access, or logins from unexpected areas of the world. Monitor access to your systems for unexpected connections. Watch for frequent and unusual access to critical resources. Watch for unusual outbound traffic that might signal data exfiltration. Watch for specific types of attacks, such as SQL injection or DDoS. For example, I monitor how rate-limiting deals with a burst of requests from the same device or IP using Sumo Logic’s Cloud Infrastructure Security. Watch for changes to highly critical files. Is someone tampering with config files? Create and monitor audit trails of user activity. This forensic information can help you to trace what happened with suspicious—or malicious—activities. Closely monitor authentication/authorization logs for frequent failed attempts. Cross-reference logs to watch for complex, cross-system attacks, such as supply chain attacks or man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks. Using a Sumo Logic dashboard of logs, metrics, and traces to track down security threats It’s also best practice to set up alerts to see issues early, giving you the lead time needed to deal with any threat. The best tools are also infrastructure agnostic and can be run on any number of hosting environments. Insights for Future Security Measures Logs help you with more than just looking into the past to figure out what happened. They also help you prepare for the future. Insights from log data can help your team craft its security strategies for the future. Benchmark your logs against your industry to help identify gaps that may cause issues in the future. Hunt through your logs for signs of subtle IOCs (indicators of compromise). Identify rules and behaviors that you can use against your logs to respond in real-time to any new threats. Use predictive modeling to anticipate future attack vectors based on current trends. Detect outliers in your datasets to surface suspicious activities What to Log. . . And How Much to Log So we know we need to use logs to identify threats both present and future. But to be the most effective, what should we log? The short answer is—everything! You want to capture everything you can, all the time. When you’re first getting started, it may be tempting to try to triage logs, guessing as to what is important to keep and what isn’t. But logging all events as they happen and putting them in the right repository for analysis later is often your best bet. In terms of log data, more is almost always better. But of course, this presents challenges. Who’s Going To Pay for All These Logs? When you retain all those logs, it can be very expensive. And it’s stressful to think about how much money it will cost to store all of this data when you just throw it in an S3 bucket for review later. For example, on AWS a daily log data ingest of 100GB/day with the ELK stack could create an annual cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This often leads to developers “self-selecting” what they think is — and isn’t — important to log. Your first option is to be smart and proactive in managing your logs. This can work for tools such as the ELK stack, as long as you follow some basic rules: Prioritize logs by classification: Figure out which logs are the most important, classify them as such, and then be more verbose with those logs. Rotate logs: Figure out how long you typically need logs and then rotate them off servers. You probably only need debug logs for a matter of weeks, but access logs for much longer. Log sampling: Only log a sampling of high-volume services. For example, log just a percentage of access requests but log all error messages. Filter logs: Pre-process all logs to remove unnecessary information, condensing their size before storing them. Alert-based logging: Configure alerts based on triggers or events that subsequently turn logging on or make your logging more verbose. Use tier-based storage: Store more recent logs on faster, more expensive storage. Move older logs to cheaper, slow storage. For example, you can archive old logs to Amazon S3. These are great steps, but unfortunately, they can involve a lot of work and a lot of guesswork. You often don’t know what you need from the logs until after the fact. A second option is to use a tool or service that offers flat-rate pricing; for example, Sumo Logic’s $0 ingest. With this type of service, you can stream all of your logs without worrying about overwhelming ingest costs. Instead of a per-GB-ingested type of billing, this plan bills based on the valuable analytics and insights you derive from that data. You can log everything and pay just for what you need to get out of your logs. In other words, you are free to log it all! Looking Forward: The Role of AI in Automating Log Analysis The right tool or service, of course, can help you make sense of all this data. And the best of these tools work pretty well. The obvious new tool to help you make sense of all this data is AI. With data that is formatted predictably, we can apply classification algorithms and other machine-learning techniques to find out exactly what we want to know about our application. AI can: Automate repetitive tasks like data cleaning and pre-processing Perform automated anomaly detection to alert on abnormal behaviors Automatically identify issues and anomalies faster and more consistently by learning from historical log data Identify complex patterns quickly Use large amounts of historical data to more accurately predict future security breaches Reduce alert fatigue by reducing false positives and false negatives Use natural language processing (NLP) to parse and understand logs Quickly integrate and parse logs from multiple, disparate systems for a more holistic view of potential attack vectors AI probably isn’t coming for your job, but it will probably make your job a whole lot easier. Conclusion Log data is one of the most valuable and available means to ensure your applications’ security and operations. It can help guard against both current and future attacks. And for log data to be of the most use, you should log as much information as you can. The last problem you want during a security crisis is to find out you didn’t log the information you need.
People initially became interested in blockchain several years ago after learning about it as a decentralized digital ledger. It supports transparency because no one can change information stored on it once added. People can also watch transactions as they happen, further enhancing visibility. But how does blockchain support the integrity of cloud-stored data? 3 Ways Blockchain Supports the Integrity of Cloud-Stored Data 1. Protecting and Facilitating the Sharing of Medical Records Technological advancements have undoubtedly improved the ease of sharing medical records between providers. When patients go to new healthcare facilities, all involved parties can easily see those individuals’ histories, treatments, test results, and more. Such records keep everyone updated about what’s happened to patients, which significantly reduces the likelihood of redundancies and confusion that could extend a health management timeline. Cloud computing has also accelerated information-sharing efforts within healthcare and other industries. It allows medical professionals to access and collaborate through scalable platforms. Many healthcare workers also appreciate how they can access cloud apps from anywhere. That convenience supports physicians who must travel for continuing medical education events, travel nurses, surgeons who split their time between multiple hospitals, and others who often work from numerous locations. However, despite these cloud computing benefits, a security-related downside is platforms use a centralized infrastructure to allow record sharing across users. That characteristic leaves cloud tools open to data breaches. In one case, researchers proposed addressing this shortcoming with a blockchain architecture to authenticate users and enable opportunities for sharing medical records securely. The group prioritized blockchain due to its immutability while seeking to create a system that allowed patients and their providers to share and store medical records securely. The researchers also wanted to design something that was not at risk of data loss or other failures. The researchers implemented so-called “special recognition keys” to identify medical-related specifics, such as identifying doctors, patients, and hospitals. When testing their system, some metrics studied included the time to complete a transaction and how well the communication-related attributes performed. The outcomes suggested the researchers’ approach worked far better than existing solutions. 2. Improving Access Control Data breaches can be costly, catastrophic events. Although there’s no single solution for preventing them, people can make meaningful progress by focusing on access control. One of the most convenient things about the cloud is it allows all authorized users to access content regardless of their location. However, as the number of people engaging with a cloud platform increases, so does the risk of compromised credentials that could allow hackers to enter networks and wreak havoc. Many corporate leaders have prioritized cloud-first strategies. That approach can strengthen cybersecurity because service providers have numerous security features to supplement internal measures. Additionally, cloud-based backup capabilities facilitate faster data recovery if cyberattacks occur. However, research suggests some access control practices used by cloud administrators have significant shortcomings that could make cyberattacks more likely. For example, one study about access management for cloud platforms found 49% of administrators store passwords in a spreadsheet. That’s a huge security risk for many reasons, but it also highlights the need for better password hygiene practices. Fortunately, the blockchain is well-positioned to solve this problem. In one example, researchers developed a blockchain system that uses attribute-based encryption technology to improve how cloud users access content. The setup also contains an audit contract that dynamically manages who can use the cloud and when. The team’s creation built a fine-grained and searchable system that maintained access control by strengthening cloud security and getting the desired results without excessive computing power. Results also showed this system increased storage capacity. When the group performed a security analysis on their blockchain creation, they found it stopped chosen-plaintext attacks and cybersecurity breaches based on guessed keywords. A theoretical examination and associated experiments suggested this tool worked better from a computing power and storage efficiency perspective than comparable alternatives. 3. Curbing Emerging Technologies’ Potential Threats Even as new technologies show tremendous progress and excite people about the future, some individuals specifically investigate how they could harm others through technological advancements. Developments associated with ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are excellent examples. Indeed, these chatbots can save people time by assisting them with tasks such as idea generation or outline creation. However, because these tools create believable-sounding paragraphs in seconds, some cybercriminals use generative artificial intelligence (genAI) chatbots to write phishing emails much faster than before. It’s easy to imagine the ramifications of a cybercriminal who writes a convincing phishing message and uses it to access someone’s cloud-stored information. ChatGPT runs on a cloud platform built by OpenAI, which created the chatbot. A lesser-known issue affecting data integrity is OpenAI uses interactions with the tool to train future versions of the algorithms. People can opt out of having their conversations become part of the training, but many people haven’t or don’t know the process for doing it. As workers eagerly tested ChatGPT and similar tools, some committed potential security breaches without realizing it. Consider if a web developer enters a proprietary code string into ChatGPT and asks the tool for help debugging it. That seemingly minor decision could result in sensitive information becoming part of training data and no longer being carefully protected by the developer’s employer. Some leaders quickly established rules for appropriate usage or banned generative AI tools to address these threats. A February 2024 study also showed some workers kept entering sensitive information when using ChatGPT despite knowing the associated risks. It’s still unclear how the blockchain will support data integrity for people using cloud-based generative AI tools, but many professionals are upbeat about the potential. Conclusion: Using Blockchain for Cloud Data Protection Entities ranging from government agencies to e-commerce stores use cloud platforms daily. These options are incredibly convenient because they eliminate geographical barriers and allow people to use them through an active internet connection anywhere in the world. However, many cloud tools store sensitive data, such as health records or payment details. Since cloud platforms hold such a wealth of information, hackers will likely continue targeting them. Although most cloud providers have built-in security features, cybercriminals continually seek ways to circumvent such protections. The examples here show why the blockchain is an excellent candidate for much-needed additional safeguards.
In today's dynamic web development world, real-time communication technologies are essential for building dynamic and interactive user experiences. From online games and live conversations to real-time notifications and collaborative editing platforms, these technologies guarantee that users quickly receive and interact with real data. WebSockets and Server-Sent Events (SSE) are popular protocols for their special functions and roles supporting real-time web applications. This article analyzes these two well-known technologies thoroughly and comprehends each. Together with new technology, we will examine their working principles, practical uses, and difficulties. By doing this, we hope to provide developers with the information they need to choose the best protocol for their real-time communication requirements, guaranteeing user experience and optimal performance. Understanding WebSockets How WebSockets Work WebSockets are a protocol that establishes a full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP connection. This allows real-time data exchange between a client and a server without repeatedly closing and reopening connections. The protocol begins with a handshake phase that utilizes the HTTP upgrade system to switch from an initial HTTP connection to a WebSocket connection. Once established, this persistent connection enables data to flow freely in both directions, significantly reducing latency and overhead compared to traditional HTTP requests. Real-World Applications and Case Studies WebSockets are famous for scenarios that demand frequent and fast data transfer, such as online gaming, financial trading platforms, and live sports updates. For example, WebSockets are used in multiplayer online games to quickly exchange player actions and game states, providing a synchronous gaming experience. Similarly, financial trading platforms rely on WebSockets to provide live price updates and execute trades in near real-time, crucial for maintaining competitiveness in volatile markets. Challenges and Solutions Implementing WebSockets, however, is challenging. Security concerns such as Cross-Site WebSocket Hijacking (CSWSH) and exposure to DDoS attacks necessitate robust security measures, including WSS (WebSocket Secure) protocols, authentication, and origin checks. Furthermore, WebSockets may encounter compatibility issues with some proxy servers and firewalls, requiring additional configurations or fallback solutions. Despite these hurdles, the benefits of real-time, bi-directional communication often outweigh the complexities, making WebSockets a powerful choice for many web applications. Exploring Server-Sent Events (SSE) How SSE Works Server-sent events offer a more straightforward, HTTP-standard method for servers to push real-time updates to the client. Unlike WebSockets, SSE establishes a unidirectional channel from server to client, making it ideal for scenarios where data predominantly flows in a single direction. SSE operates over standard HTTP, allowing for more straightforward implementation and compatibility with existing web infrastructures, including support for HTTP/2. Typical Use Cases and Comparison With WebSockets SSE excels in applications such as live news feeds, social media updates, and real-time analytics dashboards, where the primary requirement is for the server to update the client. Compared to WebSockets, SSE is easier to use and implement, given its reliance on standard HTTP mechanisms and the absence of a need for a protocol upgrade handshake. This simplicity makes SSE appealing for sending updates or notifications to web clients, such as live scores, stock ticker updates, or social media feeds. Furthermore, SSE's native support for automatic reconnection and event ID tracking simplifies handling disconnections and message tracking. Scenarios Favoring SSE SSE is a valuable technology when building applications that don't require frequent client-to-server communication. Its simplicity, low server complexity, and reduced overhead make it an attractive option for power-efficiently delivering real-time notifications and updates. This is especially helpful for mobile applications and services focusing on content delivery rather than interactive communication. With SSE, occasional traditional HTTP requests can handle any client-to-server messages. One of the advantages of SSE over WebSockets is its built-in support for automatic reconnection and event ID tracking. If a connection drops, the SSE client will automatically attempt to reconnect, and with the event ID, it can ensure that no messages are missed during the disconnection. This feature is incredibly beneficial for maintaining a smooth user experience in applications where continuous data flow is critical. Because HTTP/3 effectively manages many streams over a single connection, it improves server capacity and client concurrency for Server-Sent Events (SSE). Due to its capacity to handle packet loss and network changes more effectively, its interoperability with HTTP/3 enhances reliability and user experience. SSE's text-based format's direct browser compatibility, ease of use, and HTTP/2 performance make it perfect for server-to-client updates. Its unidirectionality, however, makes it less useful for interactive applications; in these cases, WebSockets' bidirectional connection provides a more flexible option. Performance and Implementation Considerations When comparing the technical performance of WebSockets versus Server-Sent Events (SSE), several factors, such as latency, throughput, and server load, significantly impact the choice between these technologies for real-time applications. Let's explore them. WebSockets are designed for full-duplex communication, allowing data to flow in both directions simultaneously. This design reduces latency to a minimum since messages can be sent and received anytime without the overhead of establishing new connections. Another advantage of WebSockets is their high throughput, as they can effectively handle multiple messages in a single connection. However, maintaining a persistent connection for each client can increase server load, especially in applications with many concurrent connections. The implementation complexity of WebSockets is higher due to the need to handle bidirectional messages and manage connection lifecycles. Solutions like Redis (or AWS ElastiCache for Redis when considering cloud-based solutions) can be instrumental in managing load balancing. Using Redis/ElastiCache for Scaling WebSockets Connection Management and Messaging Redis is an in-memory data store with pub/sub messaging patterns that efficiently distribute messages to multiple clients, reducing the load on your primary application server. By leveraging Redis' pub/sub capabilities, you can reduce the load on your primary application server by offloading the message distribution work to Redis. This is particularly effective in scenarios where the same data needs to be sent to many clients simultaneously. Session Management Redis can store session information and manage connection states in a WebSockets application, making it easier to handle large connections and facilitate horizontal scaling. Load Balancing and Horizontal Scaling Redis can be used with a load balancer to reduce server load to distribute connections across multiple WebSocket servers. This allows horizontal scaling by adding new instances as needed. Redis ensures consistent message routing and state information availability across all servers, making user experience maintenance easier. ElastiCache for Redis For applications running on AWS, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis offers a managed Redis service, simplifying the setup, operation, and scaling of Redis deployments in the cloud. It provides the benefits of Redis while removing the operational burden of managing the infrastructure, making it easier to implement robust, scalable WebSocket solutions. Example Implementation This code uses Redis Pub/Sub to distribute messages in a WebSocket app. It decouples the sending and receiving logic, making it useful for multiple WebSocket servers or efficient message distribution to many clients. JavaScript const WebSocket = require('ws'); const redis = require('redis'); const wss = new WebSocket.Server({ port: 8080 }); // Create Redis clients for subscribing and publishing messages const redisSub = redis.createClient(); const redisPub = redis.createClient(); // Subscribe to a Redis channel redisSub.subscribe('websocketMessages'); // Handle incoming messages from Redis to broadcast to WebSocket clients redisSub.on('message', (channel, message) => { wss.clients.forEach(client => { if (client.readyState === WebSocket.OPEN) { client.send(message); } }); }); wss.on('connection', ws => { console.log('New WebSocket connection'); ws.on('message', message => { console.log(`Received message from WebSocket client: ${message}`); // Publish received message to Redis channel redisPub.publish('websocketMessages', message); }); }); console.log('WebSocket server started on port 8080'); WebSockets Example: Real-Time Chat Application WebSockets facilitate instant messaging between users in a real-time chat application by allowing bidirectional data flow. Here's a simplified example of how WebSockets can be used to send and receive messages in such an application: This example demonstrates establishing a WebSocket connection, sending a message to the server, and handling incoming messages. The bidirectional capability of WebSockets is essential for interactive applications like chat, where users expect to send and receive messages in real time. JavaScript // Establish a WebSocket connection to the server const chatSocket = new WebSocket('wss://example.com/chat'); // Function to send a message to the server function sendMessage(message) { chatSocket.send(JSON.stringify({ type: 'message', text: message })); } // Listen for messages from the server chatSocket.onmessage = function(event) { const message = JSON.parse(event.data); if (message.type === 'message') { console.log(`New message received: ${message.text}`); displayMessage(message.text); // Display the received message on the web page } }; // Example usage: Send a message sendMessage('Hello, world!'); Server-Sent Events Example: Stock Price Updates SSE is a perfect choice for an application displaying real-time stock price updates because it efficiently pushes updates from the server to the client. This code snippet illustrates how SSE can be utilized for such a scenario. JavaScript // Create a new EventSource to listen for updates from the server const stockPriceSource = new EventSource('https://example.com/stock-prices'); // Listen for stock price updates from the server stockPriceSource.onmessage = function(event) { const stockUpdate = JSON.parse(event.data); console.log(`New stock price for ${stockUpdate.symbol}: $${stockUpdate.price}`); updateStockPriceOnPage(stockUpdate.symbol, stockUpdate.price); // Update the stock price on the web page }; // Close the connection when done stockPriceSource.close(); The Role of HTTP/3 in Real-Time Communication Technologies HTTP/3, the third major version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, significantly improves the web's overall performance and security. It is built upon Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), a transport layer network protocol designed by Google, which reduces connection establishment time, improves congestion control, and enhances security features. These improvements are particularly relevant in real-time communication technologies such as WebSockets and Server-Sent Events, as they drastically influence performance and reliability. HTTP/3 improves WebSocket performance by lowering latency and boosting connection reliability. WebSockets enable more secure and seamless real-time interactions by utilizing HTTP/3's incorporation of TLS 1.3 and QUIC for faster connections and better congestion control. The server-to-client data flow of SSE is well-aligned with HTTP/3's capacity to manage numerous streams over a single connection. In addition to improving client concurrency and server capacity, HTTP/3's resistance to path changes and packet loss increases SSE stream stability, resulting in more seamless data updates and an improved user experience. Conclusion All examples highlight the relevance of choosing the right technology based on the application's communication pattern. WebSockets excel in interactive, bidirectional scenarios like chat applications, while SSE is suited for efficiently pushing updates from the server to clients, such as in a stock ticker application. WebSockets generally offer superior performance regarding latency and throughput due to their bidirectional nature and protocol efficiency. However, SSE can be more efficient regarding server resources for use cases requiring server-to-client communication. The choice between WebSockets and SSE should be guided by the application's specific needs, considering the ease of implementation, the expected load on the server, and the type of communication required. Best practices for implementing these technologies include using WebSockets for interactive applications requiring real-time communication in both directions and opting for SSE when updates flow primarily from the server to the client. Developers should also consider fallback options for environments where either technology is unsupported, ensuring a broad reach and compatibility across different client setups.
Cloud computing has revolutionized software organizations' operations, offering unprecedented scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency in managing digital resources. This transformative technology enables businesses to rapidly deploy and scale services, adapt to changing market demands, and reduce operational costs. However, the transition to cloud infrastructure is challenging. The inherently dynamic nature of cloud environments and the escalating sophistication of cyber threats have made traditional security measures insufficient. In this rapidly evolving landscape, proactive and preventative strategies have become paramount to safeguard sensitive data and maintain operational integrity. Against this backdrop, integrating security practices within the development and operational workflows—DevSecOps—has emerged as a critical approach to fortifying cloud environments. At the heart of this paradigm shift is Continuous Security Testing (CST), a practice designed to embed security seamlessly into the fabric of cloud computing. CST facilitates the early detection and remediation of vulnerabilities and ensures that security considerations keep pace with rapid deployment cycles, thus enabling a more resilient and agile response to potential threats. By weaving security into every phase of the development process, from initial design to deployment and maintenance, CST embodies the proactive stance necessary in today's cyber landscape. This approach minimizes the attack surface and aligns with cloud services' dynamic and on-demand nature, ensuring that security evolves in lockstep with technological advancements and emerging threats. As organizations navigate the complexities of cloud adoption, embracing Continuous Security Testing within a DevSecOps framework offers a comprehensive and adaptive strategy to confront the multifaceted cyber challenges of the digital age. Most respondents (96%) of a recent software security survey believe their company would benefit from DevSecOps' central idea of automating security and compliance activities. This article describes the details of how CST can strengthen your cloud security and how you can integrate it into your cloud architecture. Key Concepts of Continuous Security Testing Continuous Security Testing (CST) helps identify and address security vulnerabilities in your application development lifecycle. Using automation tools, it analyzes your complete security structure and discovers and resolves the vulnerabilities. The following are the fundamental principles behind it: Shift-left approach: CST promotes early adoption of safety measures by bringing security testing and mitigation to the start of the software development lifecycle. This method reduces the possibility of vulnerabilities in later phases by assisting in the early detection and resolution of security issues. Automated security testing: Critical to CST is automation, which allows for consistent and quick evaluation of security measures, scanning for vulnerabilities, and code analysis. Automation ensures consistent and rapid security evaluation. Continuous monitoring and feedback: As part of CST, safety incidents and feedback chains are monitored in real-time, allowing security vulnerabilities to be identified and fixed quickly. Integrating Continuous Security Testing Into the Cloud Let's explore the phases involved in integrating CST into cloud environments. Laying the Foundation for Continuous Security Testing in the Cloud To successfully integrate Continuous Security Testing (CST), you must prepare your cloud environment first. Use a manual tool like OWASP or an automated security testing process to perform a thorough security audit and ensure your cloud environments are well-protected to lay a robust groundwork for CST. Before diving into integrating Continuous Security Testing (CST) within your cloud infrastructure, it's crucial to lay a solid foundation by meticulously preparing your cloud environment. This preparatory step involves conducting a comprehensive security audit to identify vulnerabilities and ensure your cloud architecture is fortified against threats. Leveraging tools such as the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) for manual evaluations or employing sophisticated automated security testing processes can significantly aid this endeavor. Conduct a detailed inventory of all assets and resources within your cloud architecture to assess your cloud environment's security posture. This includes everything from data storage solutions and archives to virtual machines and network configurations. By understanding the full scope of your cloud environment, you can better identify potential vulnerabilities and areas of risk. Next, systematically evaluate these components for security weaknesses, ensuring no stone is left unturned. This evaluation should encompass your cloud infrastructure's internal and external aspects, scrutinizing access controls, data encryption methods, and the security protocols of interconnected services and applications. Identifying and addressing these vulnerabilities at this stage sets a robust groundwork for the seamless integration of Continuous Security Testing, enhancing your cloud environment's resilience to cyber threats and ensuring a secure, uninterrupted operation of cloud-based services. By undertaking these critical preparatory steps, you position your organization to leverage CST effectively as a dynamic, ongoing practice that detects emerging threats in real-time and integrates security seamlessly into every phase of your cloud computing operations. Establishing Effective Security Testing Criteria The cornerstone of implementing Continuous Security Testing (CST) within cloud ecosystems is meticulously defining the security testing requirements. This pivotal step involves identifying a holistic suite of testing methodologies encompassing your security landscape, ensuring thorough coverage and protection against potential vulnerabilities. A multifaceted approach to security testing is essential for a robust defense strategy. This encompasses a variety of criteria, such as: Vulnerability scanning: Systematic examination of your cloud environment to identify and classify security loopholes. Penetration testing: Simulated cyber attacks against your system to evaluate the effectiveness of security measures. Compliance inspections: Assessments to ensure that cloud operations adhere to industry standards and regulatory requirements. Source code analysis: Examination of application source code to detect security flaws or vulnerabilities. Configuration analysis: Evaluation of system configurations to identify security weaknesses stemming from misconfigurations or outdated settings. Container security analysis: Analysis focused on the security of containerized applications, including their deployment, management, and orchestration. Organizations can proactively identify and rectify security vulnerabilities within their cloud architecture by selecting the appropriate mix of these testing criteria. This proactive stance enhances the overall security posture and embeds a culture of continuous improvement and vigilance across the cloud computing landscape. Adopting a comprehensive and systematic approach to security testing ensures that your cloud environment remains resilient against evolving cyber threats, safeguarding your critical assets and data effectively. Choosing the Right Security Testing Tools for Automation The transition to automated security testing tools is critical for achieving faster and more accurate security assessments, significantly reducing the manual effort, workforce involvement, and resources dedicated to routine tasks. A diverse range of tools exists to support this need, including Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), and safety measures for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) etc. These technologies are easy to integrate into Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and improve security by finding and fixing vulnerabilities before development. More than half of DevOps teams conduct SAST scans, 44% conduct DAST scans, and almost 50% inspect containers and dependencies as part of their security measures. However, when choosing the right tool for automation, consider features like ease of use, the ability to get updated with the vulnerability, and ROI vs. the cost of the tool. When choosing the right automation tools, evaluating them based on several critical factors beyond their primary functionalities is vital. The ease of integration into existing workflows, their capacity for timely updates in response to new vulnerabilities, and the balance between their cost and the return on investment they offer are crucial considerations. These factors ensure that the selected tools enhance security measures and align with the organization's overall security strategy and resource allocation, facilitating a more secure and efficient development lifecycle. Continuous Monitoring and Improvement The bedrock of maintaining an up-to-date and secure cloud infrastructure lies in the practices of continuous monitoring and iterative improvement throughout the entirety of its lifecycle. Integrate your cloud log with Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) capabilities to get centralized security intelligence and initiate continuous monitoring and improvement. Similarly, ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) is another tool that can help you visualize, collect, and analyze your log data. Regularly monitoring your security landscape and adapting based on the insights gleaned from testing and monitoring outputs are essential. Such a proactive approach not only aids in preemptively identifying and mitigating potential threats but also ensures that your security framework remains robust and adaptive to the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape. Strategic Risk Management and Mitigation Efforts Effective security management requires a strategic approach to evaluating and mitigating vulnerabilities, guided by their criticality, exploitability, and potential repercussions for the organization. Utilizing threat modeling techniques enables a targeted allocation of resources, focusing on areas of highest risk to reduce exposure and avert potential security incidents. Following identifying critical vulnerabilities, devising and executing a comprehensive risk mitigation strategy is imperative. This strategy should encompass a range of solutions tailored to diminish the identified risks, including the deployment of software patches and updates, the establishment of enhanced security protocols, the integration of additional safeguarding measures, or even the strategic overhaul of existing systems and processes. Organizations can fortify their defenses by prioritizing and systematically addressing vulnerabilities based on severity and impact, ensuring a more secure and resilient operational environment. Benefits of Continuous Security Testing in the Cloud There are numerous benefits of using continuous security testing in cloud environments. Early vulnerability detection: Using CST, you can identify security issues early on and address them before they pose a risk. Enhanced security quality: To better defend your cloud infrastructure against cyberattacks, security testing gives it an additional layer of protection. Enhanced innovation and agility: CST enables faster release cycles by identifying risks early on, allowing you to take proactive measures to counter them. Enhanced team collaboration: CST promotes collaboration between different teams to cultivate a culture of collective accountability for security. Compliance with industry standards: By routinely assessing its security controls and procedures, you can lessen the possibility of fines and penalties for noncompliance with corporate policies and legal requirements. Conclusion In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, Continuous Security Testing (CST) emerges as a cornerstone for safeguarding cloud environments against pervasive cyber threats. By weaving security seamlessly into the development fabric through automation and vigilant monitoring, CST empowers organizations to detect and neutralize vulnerabilities preemptively. The adoption of CST transcends mere risk management; it fosters an environment where security, innovation, and collaboration converge, propelling businesses forward. This synergistic approach elevates organizations' security posture and instills a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability. As businesses navigate the complexities of the digital age, implementing CST positions them to confidently address the dynamic nature of cyber threats, ensuring resilience and securing their future in the cloud.
With technology and data growing at an unprecedented pace, cloud computing has become a no-brainer answer for enterprises worldwide to foster growth and innovation. As we swiftly move towards the second quarter of 2024, predictions by cloud security reports highlight the challenges of cloud adoption in the cloud security landscape. Challenges Gartner Research forecasts a paradigm shift in adopting public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. By 2025, a staggering 80% of enterprises are expected to embrace multiple public cloud IaaS solutions, including various Kubernetes (K8s) offerings. This growing reliance on cloud infrastructure raises the critical issue of security, which the Cloud Security Alliance painfully highlights. According to the Cloud Security Alliance(CSA), only 23% of organizations report full visibility into their cloud environments. This lack of visibility, despite the vast potential of cloud technologies, can make organizations susceptible to potential threats within their infrastructure. Another issue that compounds the cloud visibility issues even further is duplicate alerts. A staggering 63% of organizations face duplicate security alerts, hindering security teams' ability to sort genuine threats from noise. The challenge above can be mitigated using a unified security approach, but it has been discovered that 61% of organizations are utilizing between 3 to 6 different tools. The landscape becomes more complicated to understand, highlighting the urgency of covering gaps in security defense mechanisms. A well-defined security defense mechanism minimizes manual intervention from security teams and promotes the need for automation and streamlined processes in operations. Security teams spending most of their time on manual tasks associated with security alerts not only discourages efficient resource use but also diminishes the productivity of teams working towards addressing critical security vulnerabilities. CSA statistics reveal that only a mere 18% of organizations take more than four days to remediate critical vulnerabilities, underscoring the urgency of this issue. Such delays leave systems vulnerable to potential breaches and compromises and highlight the pressing need for action. Moreover, the recurrence of vulnerabilities within a month of remediation underscores the necessity for proactive team collaboration. According to CSA, inefficient collaboration between security and development teams inadvertently creates defense gaps and heightens the risk of exploitation. By promoting communication between these critical teams, organizations can better strengthen their defenses and mitigate security threats. It is clear that the cloud security landscape requires a more comprehensive approach to gaining visibility into cloud environments. By implementing the best practices outlined below, organizations can move closer to their objective of establishing secure and resilient cloud infrastructure. Best Practices This section will delve into the essential pillars of cloud security for safeguarding your cloud assets, beginning with the following: Unified Security One of the main challenges in cloud security adoption is the lack of a unified security framework. A Unified Security Framework comprises various tools and processes that collect information from different systems and display it cohesively on one screen. When compared with traditional security tools which require their own set of architecture to work and then require additional add-ons to collect data, unified security solutions are a better way to gain a holistic view of an organization's security posture. The Unified Security framework consolidates various security processes, such as threat intelligence, access controls, and monitoring capabilities, to streamline visibility and management while facilitating collaboration between different teams, such as IT, security, and compliance. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) uses a "never trust, always verify" approach. All the stages of cloud data communication, regardless of their location in the cloud hierarchy, should be protected with verification mechanisms and adhere to zero-trust solutions. An effective zero-trust solution implemented over a cloud architecture should inspect all the unencrypted and encrypted traffic before it reaches its desired destination, with the access requests for the requested data verified beforehand for their identity and requested content. Adaptive custom access control policies should be implemented that not only change contexts based on the attack surface but also eliminate the risk of any false movements that compromise the functionality of devices. By adopting the zero-trust practices mentioned, organizations can implement robust identity and access management (IAM) with granular protection for applications, data, networks, and infrastructure. Encryption Everywhere Data encryption is a major challenge for many organizations, which can be mitigated by encrypting data at rest and in transit. An encryption-as-a-service solution can be implemented, which provides centralized encryption management for authorizing traffic across data clouds and centers. All application data can be encrypted with one centralized encryption workflow, which ensures the security of sensitive information. The data will be governed by identity-based policies, which ensure cluster communication is verified and services are authenticated based on trusted authority. Moreover, encrypting data across all layers of the cloud infrastructure—including applications, databases, and storage—increases the overall consistency and automation of cloud security. Automated tools can streamline the encryption process while making it easier to apply encryption policies consistently across the entire infrastructure. Continuous Security Compliance Monitoring Continuous security compliance monitoring is another crucial pillar for strengthening the cloud security landscape. Organizations specifically operating in healthcare (subject to HIPAA regulations) and payments (under PCI DSS guidelines) involve rigorous assessment of infrastructure and processes to protect sensitive information. To comply with these regulations, continuous compliance monitoring can be leveraged to automate the continuous scanning of cloud infrastructure for compliance gaps. The solutions can analyze logs and configuration for security risks by leveraging the concept of "compliance as code," where security considerations are embedded into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). By implementing these streamlined automated compliance checks and incorporating them into each stage of development, organizations can adhere to regulatory mandates while maintaining agility in cloud software delivery. Conclusion To conclude, achieving robust cloud security necessitates using a Unified Security approach with a Zero-Trust Architecture through continuous encryption and compliance monitoring. By adopting these best practices, organizations can strengthen their defenses against evolving cyber threats, safeguard sensitive data, and build trust with customers and stakeholders.
Cyberattacks are a common and permanent threat. This paper is the first in a series about cybersecurity. The aim is to provide software engineers with an understanding of the main threats and how to address them. Most exploits are based on basic errors. According to the OWASP top 10 report [1], injection remains in the top three threats. However, it is important to note that the report covers more than just SQL injection [2]. It also includes: CWE-79: Cross-site Scripting CWE-89: SQL Injection CWE-73: External Control of File Name or Path Here we will focus on SQL Injections, their types, how to prevent them, and some real-world examples. Table of Contents What is an SQL Injection? A basic example The different types3.1 In-band SQLi3.2 Inferential SQLi3.3 Out-of-band SQLi Prevention4.1 Prevention in Frontend4.2 Prevention in Backtend Real-Life SQLi Examples5.1 Sony5.2 Tesla5.3 Cisco5.4 Fortnite Conclusion Sources 1. What Is an SQL Injection? SQL Injection (SQLi) is a code injection technique that exploits a security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application. The vulnerability is present when user inputs are either improperly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and thereby unexpectedly executed. This allows an attacker to manipulate SQL queries, enabling them to unauthorized access, modify, and delete data in the database. This can lead to significant breaches of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, ranging from unauthorized viewing of data to complete database compromise. 2. A Basic Example Consider a simple web application that uses a SQL database to store user information. Users log in to the application by entering their username and password, which the application checks by running a SQL query: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '[username]' AND password = '[password]'; An attacker could exploit this by entering a username that always returns true, such as "bash". ' OR '1'='1 If the application directly concatenates this input into a SQL query without proper sanitization, the resulting query becomes: SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '' OR '1'='1' AND password = '[password]'; Since '1'='1' is always true, the query returns all rows from the users table, effectively bypassing the authentication mechanism. This is a very simple example to illustrate what is the basic idea behind an SQL Injection. 3. The Different Types There are three main types of SQLi: In-band, Inferential, and Out-of-band. Types of SQLi 3.1. In-Band This type of SQL Injection leverages the same communication channel to launch the attack and gather results [3]. In-band SQLi Tautologies To trick a conditional return and gain access to unauthorized data, one can use a statement that is always true. ' OR '1'='1 Union Queries The aim is to utilize the UNION keyword to add a new query for retrieving additional data. SELECT title, author FROM books WHERE title LIKE '%[user_input]%'; Injected query: ' UNION SELECT username, password FROM users Error-Based The attacker is attempting to obtain information about the database structure by exploiting error messages. This is a form of malicious reverse engineering. 3.2 Inferential (Blind-SQLi) This attack occurs when an attacker sends data payloads to the server and observes the response or behavior of the server to learn about its structure. The attack is called “blind” because the attacker cannot see the result of the executed query directly, and no data are exchanged [3]. Inferential (Blind-SQLi) Boolean-Based The attacker sends a specific query to obtain a boolean response. Based on these responses, the attacker tries to enumerate the data structure. Time-Based This is a blind attack that delays query execution to infer database structure from the response time. 3.3. Out-of-Band This type of attack is used when an attacker is unable to use the same channel to both launch the attack and gather information or when the server is too slow or unstable. It relies on the server’s ability to make DNS or HTTP requests to transmit data to an attacker [3]. Out-of-band SQLi 4. Prevention In modern web applications, an injection can occur at many different levels and will be handled differently depending on the language, framework, or transport protocol used at each level. Your UI and APIs are the most exposed parts of your web application. They are often accessible on the internet, and even if they are protected with authentication protocols and authorization levels, they are still the most vulnerable. Basic web app vulnerabilities for SQLi location 4.1 Prevention in Frontend In modern web development, frameworks like Angular provide built-in features to prevent SQL Injection, primarily by separating the code from the data. This separation ensures that user inputs are handled in a way that mitigates the risk of inadvertently executing malicious SQL code [4]. Example: Angular Data Binding Angular employs data binding techniques that automatically handle the encoding and management of user inputs, thus preventing the injection of executable code into the application. Consider a simple form input bound to a model property: <input [(ngModel)]="userInput" type="text"> // Component code userInput: string; Angular treats userInputas text rather than executable code, allowing for effective input sanitization. Example: HTTPClient and Parameterized APIs When making HTTP requests, Angular’s HttpClient service automatically escapes query parameters, reducing the risk of SQL Injection attacks originating from the front end. Consider the following example where user input is sent to a server-side API: searchProducts(searchTerm: string): Observable<Product[]> { const params = new HttpParams().set('query', searchTerm); return this.httpClient.get<Product[]>('/api/products/search', { params }); } In this case, HttpParams ensures that searchTerm is correctly encoded, preventing any attempt to inject SQL code through the front end. 4.2 Prevention in Backend For backend prevention, frameworks like Spring and Hibernate provide robust mechanisms to control inputs from APIs, enhancing security against SQL injection [4]. Input Validation Spring’s approach centers on using @RequestParam or @PathVariable annotations to strictly control input types and employ Spring Security for comprehensive input validation. Spring Data JPA Repositories Spring Data JPA repositories abstract the complexity of direct database interactions, using Hibernate to prevent SQL Injection. Here’s an example of a repository method that finds a user by username: public interface UserRepository extends JpaRepository<User, Long> { User findByUsername(String username); } Spring Data JPA automatically translates this method into a SQL query that uses prepared statements, ensuring that username is treated as a parameter, not part of the SQL command itself. Hibernate Hibernate, on the other hand, emphasizes the use of HQL (Hibernate Query Language) with named parameters to prevent the direct inclusion of user inputs in queries, thereby safeguarding against injection attacks [4]. Here’s a simplified example using HQL with named parameters: // Unsafe HQL Statement String hql = "FROM Inventory WHERE productId = '" + userInput + "'"; // Safe HQL using named parameters String safeHql = "FROM Inventory WHERE productId = :productId"; Query query = session.createQuery(safeHql); query.setParameter("productId", userInput); This approach ensures that user inputs are handled safely, effectively preventing SQL injection by separating code from data within the query execution process. Protection location in a basic web app 5. Real-Life SQLi Examples 5.1 Sony Pictures (2011) In 2011, Sony Pictures faced a significant cybersecurity breach, with the attack compromising about 77 million PlayStation Network accounts and unveiling users’ personal information. As reported by The Washington Post, this incident resulted in around $170 million in financial losses for Sony. This episode not only demonstrated the susceptibility of advanced digital networks to cyber threats like SQL Injection but also underscored the urgent need for stringent cybersecurity measures across the digital entertainment sector to protect user data [5]. 5.2 Tesla (2014) In 2014, Tesla faced a security breach when researchers exploited an SQL Injection vulnerability on its website, obtaining administrative rights and accessing user data. This incident underscored the critical need for stringent web application security measures [6]. 5.3 Cisco (2018) Cisco’s Prime License Manager was compromised in 2018 due to a SQL injection vulnerability, allowing attackers shell access to systems. Cisco swiftly resolved the issue, highlighting the ongoing challenge of securing software against SQL injection attacks [7]. 5.4 Fortnite (2019) In 2019, Fortnite experienced a significant security breach. This incident involved a vulnerability within one of Epic Games’ subdomains, which attackers exploited to perform an SQL injection attack. This allowed unauthorized access to user accounts and their personal information. The breach underscored the importance of robust cybersecurity practices and the constant vigilance needed to protect digital assets and user data in the gaming industry [8]. 6. Conclusion SQL Injection (SQLi) represents a significant vulnerability that exposes web applications to various attacks, potentially leading to unauthorized data access or manipulation. This detailed exploration has identified multiple SQLi types, including In-band, Inferential (Blind SQLi), and Out-of-band attacks, each with unique characteristics and exploitation techniques. To combat these vulnerabilities, we’ve presented a range of preventative measures, leveraging modern frameworks and best practices such as input validation, parameterized queries, and the use of prepared statements. These strategies are crucial for developers to implement, ensuring the security and integrity of their applications. 7. Sources [1] : OWASP Top Ten Project: OWASP [2] : Injection Flaws — OWASP Top 10 A03:2021: OWASP Injection [3] : Academic Research on SQLi: JISRC, Sifisheriessciences [4] : SQL Injection Prevention Cheat Sheet: OWASP Cheat Sheet [5] : 2014 Sony Pictures Hack: Wikipedia [6] : Tesla Motors Blind SQL Injection: Bitquark [7] : Cisco Patches Prime License Manager SQL Injection Vulnerability: SC Magazine [8] : Fortnite Account Hacked via SQL Injection: The Hacker News
In today's digital age, cloud-hosted applications frequently use storage solutions like AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage for images, documents, and more. Public URLs allow direct access to publicly accessible resources. However, sensitive images require protection and are not readily accessible via public URLs. Accessing such an image involves a JWT-protected API endpoint, which returns the needed image. We must pass the JWT token in the header to fetch the image using the GET API. The standard method for rendering these images in HTML uses JavaScript, which binds the byte content from the API to the img src attribute. Though straightforward, this approach might not always be suitable, especially when avoiding JavaScript execution. Could we simplify the process by assigning a direct URL to the img src attribute to render images without JavaScript and don't need to pass the JWT token in the header? This is possible with pre-signed URLs provided by AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage, which grant temporary access to private resources by appending a unique, expiring token to the URL. While enhancing security by limiting access time, pre-signed URLs don't restrict the number of access attempts, allowing potentially unlimited access within the time window. Acknowledging this, a solution is needed that restricts access time for images within the HTML attribute and limits access attempts, ensuring sensitive images are safeguarded against unauthorized distribution. Time and Attempts Limited Cloud Storage Resource Access To address this challenge, we developed a solution combining cloud resources and associated database mapping with unique identifiers (GUIDs) and a token system that gets appended to the URL. We employ a GET API for secure image rendering that combines the base URL, document identifier, and token as query parameters. This method circumvents the limitations of embedding tokens in headers for image src attributes. Unique Identifier for the Image For the image for which we have the requirement to be rendered in an HTML document through the image src attribute, we generate a unique identifier for this image and persist the image cloud storage path and associated unique identifier (GUID) in the database; there is a dedicated API which does this functionality. This API is part of the microservice responsible for managing all the cloud documents for us. Token Management In a master token table, we define token types with attributes such as description, reusability, expiry, and access limits. Using the token type above, we generate a limited-time use token for the image identifier. Each image identifier is assigned a token, stored in a transaction token table with the image identifier GUID, enabling us to track access attempts. We have a microservice to manage these tokens. We will generate this limited-time token using one of the APIs from that microservice. Now we have both a unique identifier for the image and a time use token; based on that, we build the URL for the cloud storage resource something like below: {{baseUrl}/v1/document/{{imageIdentifier}?token={{limitedTimeUseToken} Sample URL: https://api.fabrikam.com/v1/document/e8655967-3d85-4a5c-b1a8-bb885cc4b81b?token=d5c68f04-b674-4df8-8729-081fe7a8f6b7 The above URL is for the API endpoint, which will send image bytes as a response once the token is validated. We will be covering this API in detail below. API To Render Image This API is straightforward. It will fetch the image cloud storage path based on the document UUID sent and then go to AWS S3 to pull the image. But before it performs all this, it goes through the token validation process through a filter. Sometimes, we need to perform certain operations on client requests before they reach the controller. Similarly, we may need to process controller responses before they are returned to clients. We can accomplish this by utilizing filters in Spring web applications. The above URL is an API endpoint in the documents microservice; the call goes through the filter DocAccessTokenFilter before reaching the controller. DocAccessTokenFilter acts as a gatekeeper for incoming requests to our documents or images serving API. This filter intercepts HTTP requests before they reach their intended controller, performing token validation to ensure that the requestor has permission to access the requested resource. Below is the implementation of the filter: Java @Order(1) public class DocAccessTokenFilter implements Filter { private Logger logger = CoreLoggerFactory.getLogger(DocAccessTokenFilter.class); private String tokenValidationApiUrl; public DocAccessTokenFilter(String dlApiBaseUrl) { this.tokenValidationApiUrl = String.format("%s/%s", dlApiBaseUrl, "doctoken/validate"); } @Override public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException { final HttpServletRequest req = (HttpServletRequest) request; final HttpServletResponse res = (HttpServletResponse) response; final String docToken = req.getParameter("token"); if (StringUtils.isNullOrEmpty(docToken)) { sendError(res, "Missing Document Access Token"); } else { RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate(); HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory requestFactory = new HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory(); restTemplate.setRequestFactory(requestFactory); HttpHeaders headers = new HttpHeaders(); headers.setContentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON); TokenValidateRequest tknValidateReq = new TokenValidateRequest(); tknValidateReq.setToken(docToken); ResponseEntity<ApiResult> tknValidateResp = null; HttpEntity<TokenValidateRequest> tknValidateReqEntity = new HttpEntity<>(tknValidateReq, headers); try { tknValidateResp = restTemplate.postForEntity(tokenValidationApiUrl, tknValidateReqEntity, ApiResult.class); if (tknValidateResp.getStatusCode() == HttpStatus.OK) { logger.warn("Token validation successful"); chain.doFilter(request, response); } else { sendError(res, "Invalid Token"); } } catch (Exception ex) { logger.warn(String.format("Exception while validating token %s", ex.getMessage())); sendError(res, "Invalid Token"); } } } private void sendError(HttpServletResponse response, String errorMsg) throws IOException { response.resetBuffer(); response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_UNAUTHORIZED); response.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/json"); ApiResult result = new ApiResult(); result.setStatus(HttpStatus.UNAUTHORIZED); result.setMessage(errorMsg); ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper(); String concatenatedMsg = mapper.writeValueAsString(result); response.getOutputStream().print(concatenatedMsg); response.flushBuffer(); } } In the filter, we take the token query parameter, pass, and validate that token against the service responsible for managing the tokens, including validating the tokens. If this API returns HTTP status 200, then it's a valid token, and in all other cases, it would be treated as an invalid token. In cases where the token is not passed or token validation fails, the filter throws an HTTP 401 unauthorized error code back to the consuming client application. The filter calls another API responsible for validation and managing all tokens. This filter ensures that every request to access a document or image passes through a security checkpoint, verifying that the requestor possesses a valid, unexpired access token. We need to configure the filter as part of the Spring Boot application as below: Java @EnableWebSecurity @Configuration @Order(2) public class DocSecurityConfiguration extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter { @Autowired Environment env; @Value("${token.validation.api}") String tokenValidationApiUrl;; @Override public void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception { http .csrf().disable() .requestMatchers() .antMatchers("/api/v1/document/**").and() .addFilterBefore(new DocAccessTokenFilter(this.tokenValidationApiUrl), UsernamePasswordAuthenticationFilter.class) .authorizeRequests().anyRequest().permitAll(); } } We configure security for a Spring web application, specifically applying token validation for requests accessing document resources. We insert a custom filter to validate access tokens, ensuring that document or image access is securely controlled based on token validation rules of attempts and time. Conclusion The solution transcends the limitations of pre-signed URLs with an access control system based on time and attempts, enhancing security for cloud-stored images. It simplifies their integration into HTML documents, especially for generating digital documents with HTML content in mobile applications. An application example includes displaying a user's digital wet ink signature, securely stored in cloud storage and seamlessly embedded without relying on JavaScript.
Good Old History: Sessions Back in the old days, we used to secure web applications with sessions. The concept was straightforward: upon user authentication, the application would issue a session identifier, which the user would subsequently present in each subsequent call. On the backend side, the common approach was to have application memory storage to handle user authorization - simple mapping between session ID and user privileges. Unfortunately, the simple solution had scaling limitations. If we needed to scale an application server, we used to apply session stickiness on the exposed load balancer: Or, move session data to shared storage like a database. That caused other challenges to tackle: how to evenly distribute traffic for long living sessions and how to reduce request processing time for communication with shared session storage. Distributed Nature of Authorization The stateful nature of sessions becomes even more troublesome when we consider distributed applications. Handling proper session stickiness, and connection draining on a scale like multiple microservices gives no easy manageable solution. Stateless Authorization: JWT Luckily, we can use a stateless solution - JWT - which is based on a compact and self-contained, encoded JSON object acting as a replacement for session ID for client/server communication. The idea is to encode user privileges or roles into a token and sign data with a trusted issuer to prove token integrity. In this scenario, the user, once authenticated, gets an access token in response with all data required for authorization - no more server session storage needed. The server during authorization needs to decode the token and get user privileges from the token itself. Exposing Unprotected API in Kong To see how things can work, let’s use Kong, acting as an API Gateway for calling upstream service. For this demo, we will use the Kong Enterprise edition together with the OpenID Connect plugin handling JWT validation. But let's first expose some REST resources with Kong. To make the demo simple, we can expose a single/mock endpoint in Kong which will proxy requests to the httpbin.org service. Endpoint deployment can be done with a declarative approach: we define the configuration for setting up the Kong service that will call upstream. Then the decK tool will create respective resources in Kong Gateway. The configuration file is as follows: YAML _format_version: "3.0" _transform: true services: - host: httpbin.org name: example_service routes: - name: example_route paths: - /mock Once deployed, we can verify endpoint details in Kong Manager UI: For now, the endpoint is not protected and we can call it without any authorization details. Kong Gateway is exposed on a local machine on port 8000, so we can call it like this: ➜ ~ curl http://localhost:8000/mock/anything { "args": {}, "data": "", "files": {}, "form": {}, "headers": { "Accept": "*/*", "Host": "httpbin.org", "User-Agent": "curl/8.4.0", "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-65e2f62e-2ea7165246c573e24a3efeaf", "X-Forwarded-Host": "localhost", "X-Forwarded-Path": "/mock/anything", "X-Forwarded-Prefix": "/mock", "X-Kong-Request-Id": "3cef792ded0dfb53575cd866c20aba42" }, "json": null, "method": "GET", "url": "http://localhost/anything" } Securing API With OpenID Connect Plugin To secure our API we need two things: IdP server, which will issue JWT tokens Kong endpoint configuration that will validate JWT tokens Setting up an IdP server is out of scope for this blog post, but for the demo, we can use Keycloak. In my test setup, I created a “test” user which is granted to have a “custom-api-get” scope - we will use this scope name later on for authorization with Kong. To get a JWT token, we need to call the Keycloak token endpoint. It returns an encoded token, which we can decode on the jwt.io website: On the Kong side, we will define endpoint authorization with the OpenID Connect plugin. For this, again, we will use the decK tool to update the endpoint definition. YAML _format_version: "3.0" _transform: true services: - host: httpbin.org name: example_service routes: - name: example_route paths: - /mock plugins: - name: openid-connect enabled: true config: display_errors: true scopes_claim: - scope bearer_token_param_type: - header issuer: http://keycloak:8080/auth/realms/master/.well-known/openid-configuration scopes_required: - custom-api-get auth_methods: - bearer In the setup above, we stated that the user is allowed to call the endpoint if the JWT token contains the “custom-api-get” scope. We also specified how we want to pass the token (header value). To enable JWT signature verification, we also had to define the issuer. Kong will use this endpoint internally to get a list of public keys that can be used to check token integrity/signature (the content of that response is cached in Kong to avoid future requests). With this configuration, calling an endpoint without a token is not allowed. The plugin returns error details as follows: ➜ ~ curl http://localhost:8000/mock/anything {"message":"Unauthorized (no suitable authorization credentials were provided)"} To make it work, we need to pass a JWT token (for the sake of space, the token value is not presented): ➜ ~ curl http://localhost:8000/mock/anything --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" { "args": {}, "data": "", "files": {}, "form": {}, "headers": { "Accept": "*/*", "Authorization": "Bearer $TOKEN", "Host": "httpbin.org", "User-Agent": "curl/8.4.0", "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-65e30053-4f1b17b771c240463a878c41", "X-Forwarded-Host": "localhost", "X-Forwarded-Path": "/mock/anything", "X-Forwarded-Prefix": "/mock", "X-Kong-Request-Id": "c1cf555ab43d951f73f72a30d5546516" }, "json": null, "method": "GET", "url": "http://localhost/anything" } We should remember that tokens have a limited lifetime (in our demo, it was 1 minute), and the plugin verifies it as well. Calling the endpoint with an expired token returns the error: curl http://localhost:8000/mock/anything --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" {"message":"Unauthorized (invalid exp claim (1709375597) was specified for access token)"} Summary In this short post, we walked through the issues of session-based authorization and the benefits of stateless tokens, namely JWT. In a microservices solution, we can move authorization from microservice implementation into a centralized layer like Gateway. We just scratched the surface of JWT-based authorization, but we can implement more advanced scenarios by validating additional claims. If you’re interested in JWT details, I recommend you familiarize yourself with the specifications. Practice will make you an expert!
In the world of modern web development, security is paramount. With the rise of sophisticated cyber threats, developers need robust tools and frameworks to build secure applications. Deno, a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, has emerged as a promising solution for developers looking to enhance the security of their applications. Deno was created by Ryan Dahl, the original creator of Node.js, with a focus on addressing some of the security issues present in Node.js. Deno comes with several built-in security features that make it a compelling choice for developers concerned about application security. This guide will explore some of the key security features of Deno and how they can help you build trustworthy applications. Deno’s "Secure by Default" Features Deno achieves "Secure by Default" through several key design choices and built-in features: No file, network, or environment access by default: Unlike Node.js, which grants access to the file system, network, and environment variables by default, Deno restricts these permissions unless explicitly granted. This reduces the attack surface of applications running in Deno. Explicit permissions: Deno requires explicit permissions for accessing files, networks, and other resources, which are granted through command-line flags or configuration files. This helps developers understand and control the permissions their applications have. Built-in security features: Deno includes several built-in security features, such as a secure runtime environment (using V8 and Rust), automatic updates, and a dependency inspector to identify potentially unsafe dependencies. Secure standard library: Deno provides a secure standard library for common tasks, such as file I/O, networking, and cryptography, which is designed with security best practices in mind. Sandboxed execution: Deno uses V8's built-in sandboxing features to isolate the execution of JavaScript and TypeScript code, preventing it from accessing sensitive resources or interfering with other applications. No access to critical system resources: Deno does not have access to critical system resources, such as the registry (Windows) or keychain (macOS), further reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities. Overall, Deno's "Secure by Default" approach aims to provide developers with a safer environment for building applications, helping to mitigate common security risks associated with JavaScript and TypeScript development. Comparison of “Secure by Default” With Node.js Deno takes a more proactive approach to security by restricting access to resources by default and requiring explicit permissions for access. It also includes built-in security features and a secure standard library, making it more secure by default compared to Node.js. Feature Deno Node.js File access Denied by default, requires explicit permission Allowed by default Network access Denied by default, requires explicit permission Allowed by default Environment access Denied by default, requires explicit permission Allowed by default Permissions system Uses command-line flags or configuration files Requires setting environment variables Built-in security Includes built-in security features Lacks comprehensive built-in security Standard library Secure standard library Standard library with potential vulnerabilities Sandboxed execution Uses V8's sandboxing features Lacks built-in sandboxing features Access to resources Restricted access to critical system resources May have access to critical system resources Permission Model Deno's permission model is central to its "Secure by Default" approach. Here's how it works: No implicit permissions: In Deno, access to resources like the file system, network, and environment variables is denied by default. This means that even if a script tries to access these resources, it will be blocked unless the user explicitly grants permission. Explicit permission requests: When a Deno script attempts to access a resource that requires permission, such as reading a file or making a network request, Deno will throw an error indicating that permission is required. The script must then be run again with the appropriate command-line flag (--allow-read, --allow-net, etc.) to grant the necessary permission. Fine-grained permissions: Deno's permission system is designed to be fine-grained, allowing developers to grant specific permissions for different operations. For example, a script might be granted permission to read files but not write them, or to access a specific network address but not others. Scoped permissions: Permissions in Deno are scoped to the script's URL. This means that if a script is granted permission to access a resource, it can only access that specific resource and not others. This helps prevent scripts from accessing resources they shouldn't have access to. Permissions prompt: When a script requests permission for the first time, Deno will prompt the user to grant or deny permission. This helps ensure that the user is aware of the permissions being requested and can make an informed decision about whether to grant them. Overall, Deno's permission model is designed to give developers fine-grained control over the resources their scripts can access, while also ensuring that access is only granted when explicitly requested and authorized by the user. This helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive resources and contributes to Deno's "Secure by Default" approach. Sandboxing Sandboxing in Deno helps achieve "secure by default" by isolating the execution of JavaScript and TypeScript code within a restricted environment. This isolation prevents code from accessing sensitive resources or interfering with other applications, enhancing the security of the runtime. Here's how sandboxing helps in Deno: Isolation: Sandboxing in Deno uses V8's built-in sandboxing features to create a secure environment for executing code. This isolation ensures that code running in Deno cannot access resources outside of its sandbox, such as the file system or network, without explicit permission. Prevention of malicious behavior: By isolating code in a sandbox, Deno can prevent malicious code from causing harm to the system or other applications. Even if a piece of code is compromised, it is limited in its ability to access sensitive resources or perform malicious actions. Enhanced security: Sandboxing helps enhance the overall security of Deno by reducing the attack surface available to potential attackers. It adds an additional layer of protection against common security vulnerabilities, such as arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation. Controlled access to resources: Sandboxing allows Deno to control access to resources by requiring explicit permissions for certain actions. This helps ensure that applications only access resources they are authorized to access, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. Overall, sandboxing plays a crucial role in Deno's "secure by default" approach by providing a secure environment for executing code and preventing malicious behavior. It helps enhance the security of applications running in Deno by limiting their access to resources and reducing the impact of potential security vulnerabilities. Secure Runtime APIs Deno's secure runtime APIs provide a robust foundation for building secure applications by default. With features such as sandboxed execution, explicit permission requests, and controlled access to critical resources, Deno ensures that applications run in a secure environment. Sandboxed execution isolates code, preventing it from accessing sensitive resources or interfering with other applications. Deno's permission model requires explicit permission requests for accessing resources like the file system, network, and environment variables, reducing the risk of unintended or malicious access. Additionally, Deno's secure runtime APIs do not have access to critical system resources, further enhancing security. Overall, Deno's secure runtime APIs help developers build secure applications from the ground up, making security a core part of the development process. Implement Secure Runtime APIs Implementing secure runtime APIs in Deno involves using Deno's built-in features and following best practices for secure coding. Here's how you can implement secure-by-default behavior in Deno with examples: Explicitly request permissions: Use Deno's permission model to explicitly request access to resources. For example, to read from a file, you would use the --allow-read flag: TypeScript const file = await Deno.open("example.txt"); // Read from the file... Deno.close(file.rid); Avoid insecure features: Instead of using Node.js-style child_process for executing shell commands, use Deno's Deno.run API, which is designed to be more secure: TypeScript const process = Deno.run({ cmd: ["echo", "Hello, Deno!"], }); await process.status(); Enable secure flag for import maps: When using import maps, ensure the secure flag is enabled to restrict imports to HTTPS URLs only: JSON { "imports": { "example": "https://example.com/module.ts" }, "secure": true } Use HTTPS for network requests: Always use HTTPS for network requests. Deno's fetch API supports HTTPS by default: TypeScript const response = await fetch("https://example.com/data.json"); const data = await response.json(); Update dependencies regularly: Use Deno's built-in security audits to identify and update dependencies with known vulnerabilities: Shell deno audit Enable secure runtime features: Take advantage of Deno's secure runtime features, such as automatic updates and dependency inspection, to enhance the security of your application. Implement secure coding practices: Follow secure coding practices, such as input validation and proper error handling, to minimize security risks in your code. Managing Dependencies To Reduce Security Risks To reduce security risks associated with dependencies, consider the following recommendations: Regularly update dependencies: Regularly update your dependencies to the latest versions, as newer versions often include security patches and bug fixes. Use tools like deno audit to identify and update dependencies with known vulnerabilities. Use semantic versioning: Follow semantic versioning (SemVer) for your dependencies and specify version ranges carefully in your deps.ts file to ensure that you receive bug fixes and security patches without breaking changes. Limit dependency scope: Only include dependencies that are necessary for your project's functionality. Avoid including unnecessary or unused dependencies, as they can introduce additional security risks. Use import maps: Use import maps to explicitly specify the mapping between module specifiers and URLs. This helps prevent the use of malicious or insecure dependencies by controlling which dependencies are used in your application. Check dependency health: Regularly check the health of your dependencies using tools like `deno doctor` or third-party services. Look for dependencies with known vulnerabilities or that are no longer actively maintained. Use dependency analysis tools: Use dependency analysis tools to identify and remove unused dependencies, as well as to detect and fix vulnerabilities in your dependencies. Review third-party code: When using third-party dependencies, review the source code and documentation to ensure that they meet your security standards. Consider using dependencies from reputable sources or well-known developers. Monitor for security vulnerabilities: Monitor security advisories and mailing lists for your dependencies to stay informed about potential security vulnerabilities. Consider using automated tools to monitor for vulnerabilities in your dependencies. Consider security frameworks: Consider using security frameworks and libraries that provide additional security features, such as input validation, authentication, and encryption, to enhance the security of your application. Implement secure coding practices: Follow secure coding practices to minimize security risks in your code, such as input validation, proper error handling, and using secure algorithms for cryptography. Secure Coding Best Practices Secure coding practices in Deno are similar to those in other programming languages but are adapted to Deno's unique features and security model. Here are some best practices for secure coding in Deno: Use explicit permissions: Always use explicit permissions when accessing resources like the file system, network, or environment variables. Use the --allow-read, --allow-write, --allow-net, and other flags to grant permissions only when necessary. Avoid using unsafe APIs: Deno provides secure alternatives to some Node.js APIs that are considered unsafe, such as the child_process module. Use Deno's secure APIs instead. Sanitize input: Always sanitize user input to prevent attacks like SQL injection, XSS, and command injection. Use libraries like std/encoding/html to encode HTML entities and prevent XSS attacks. Use HTTPS: Always use HTTPS for network communication to ensure data integrity and confidentiality. Deno's fetch API supports HTTPS by default. Validate dependencies: Regularly audit and update your dependencies to ensure they are secure. Use Deno's built-in audit tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in your dependencies. Use secure standard library: Deno's standard library (std) provides secure implementations of common functionality. Use these modules instead of relying on third-party libraries with potential vulnerabilities. Avoid eval: Avoid using eval or similar functions, as they can introduce security vulnerabilities by executing arbitrary code. Use alternative approaches, such as functions and modules, to achieve the desired functionality. Minimize dependencies: Minimize the number of dependencies in your project to reduce the attack surface. Only include dependencies that are necessary for your application's functionality. Regularly update Deno: Keep Deno up to date with the latest security patches and updates to mitigate potential vulnerabilities in the runtime. Enable secure flags: When using import maps, enable the secure flag to restrict imports to HTTPS URLs only, preventing potential security risks associated with HTTP imports. Conclusion Deno's design philosophy, which emphasizes security and simplicity, makes it an ideal choice for developers looking to build secure applications. Deno's permission model and sandboxing features ensure that applications have access only to the resources they need, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. Additionally, Deno's secure runtime APIs provide developers with tools to implement encryption, authentication, and other security measures effectively. By leveraging Deno's security features, developers can build applications that are not only secure but also reliable and trustworthy. Deno's emphasis on security from the ground up helps developers mitigate common security risks and build applications that users can trust. As we continue to rely more on digital technologies, the importance of building trustworthy applications cannot be overstated, and Deno provides developers with the tools they need to meet this challenge head-on.
Apostolos Giannakidis
Product Security,
Microsoft
Kellyn Gorman
Director of Data and AI,
Silk
Boris Zaikin
Lead Solution Architect,
CloudAstro GmBH