Sometimes frontend developers forget about web security. Thinking about the quality of a website, you usually look at metrics such as performance, SEO, and accessibility. However, the web site’s capacity to repel malicious attacks usually falls under the radar. Significant measures need to be taken since backend and frontend are responsible for securing data that both of them share. Even when sensitive data is safely locked in a backend, the frontend holds the main entries.
Many malicious users can compromise your frontend application, but we can minimize the risks. You can take some measures from these attacks by following better development practices. This article will cover 6 easy ways to improve the protection of your web application.
6 SECURITY TIPS
Powerful content security policy (CSP)
Have you ever ask yourself if you should trust everything that the server sends? You must always put a strong Content-Security-Policy HTTP header. This will only allow some trusted content to be elaborated on the browser. CSP can detect attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and clickjacking
With a strong CSP, you can be able to remove potentially malicious code execution and restrict the domain while external resources are loaded. Also, applications trust only the scripts fromapis.xyz.com
, self
, and some others.
Take XSS protection mode
When malicious code gets introduce from user input, this can be blocked by supplying "X-XSS-Protection": "1; mode=block"
header. For example, you want to address users by their names linked them through marketing emails. James Hall, director of Parallax, suggests adding ?name=James
into the query string and next add to the DOM.
Trusted Types
Modern front-end frameworks such as Angular or React are not totally immune to XSS attacks. Liran Tal, a member of the Node.js Security Working Group, recommends trusted types to go through XSS issues. This will be leveraging the Content Security Policy that is used with sensitive APIs such as innerHTML
.
Prevent Clickjacking attacks
Clickjacking is an attack where a user is a trick to click on a webpage or an element that are not part of the site. This will cause users to unwittingly provide credentials or sensitive information, download malware, purchase a product online, or transfer money. Therefore, you can protect against this attack with the X-Frame-Options
header.
UI frameworks
With a UI framework such as React, Vue, and Angular have built strong security. In fact, they have a large chance to eliminate the risks of XSS attacks. Automatically, a encode HTML output reduces the necessity to use XSS-susceptible DOM APIs. Thus, you start given unambiguous names to potentially dangerous methods such as dangerouslySetInnerHTML
.
Be careful with Google tag Manager
By using Google Tag Manager, you can add the latest tracking scripts, support chatbot, and Hotjar for user analytics. However, if your Google account gets hacked, any arbitrary can be added to JavaScript to your website. For example, your users off to a fake payment page to complete their order and sends the money to somewhere else.
CONCLUSION
Nowadays, security has become a top priority for many businesses. These malicious attacks can occur to large or small sites. You need to take care of customer data since errors might happen when deploying a website or app. Customers have higher expectations about the safety of their information. With these 6 security tips for frontend, you can secure and reduce vulnerabilities because it will create a trust to your clients.
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