Web App Security Cheat Sheet

1 minute, 36 seconds

I recently documented best security practices for writing a web app. Since I was most of the way there for a nice tidy blog post on the topic, I’m using the contents of those docs as a cheat sheet for web app security. Best to refer to OWASP for a more exhaustive list, but here’s mine in PHP/Apache:

title description sample
No Traffic on Port 80 Always use an encrypted channel for web traffic, never send a session cookie in the clear RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}
HSTS Set header so after 1st redirect, client goes directly to SSL connection Header always set Strict-Transport-Security
“max-age=15768000”
Forward Secrecy Use ephemeral keys for TLS connections to prevent wholesale decryption if private key is compromised SSLCipherSuite EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH
SSLProtocol All -SSLv2 -SSLv3
SSLHonorCipherOrder On
Anti-Clickjacking Prevent your site from being included in an iframe Header always set X-Frame-Options DENY
Anti-CSRF Nonces No one getting tricked to submit pre-filled forms using their existing session cookie $_POST[$NONCEKEY] == $_COOKIE[$NONCEKEY]
(but more to it – see this gist)
XSS escaping NEVER TRUST USER INPUT, save raw values to DB, cleanse on display print htmlspecialchars($user_string_here, ENT_QUOTES, ‘UTF-8’)
Secure cookies Never transmit cookies in the clear, works well with HSTS setcookie( ‘session’, $sessionId, 0, ‘/’, ‘www.example.com’, isset($_SERVER[“HTTPS”]), true);
HttpOnly cookies don’t allow JavaScript/XSS to access your cookies setcookie( ‘session’, $sessionId, 0, ‘/’, ‘www.example.com’, isset($_SERVER[“HTTPS”]), true);
bcrypt hashes Use a *slow* hashing method instead of a *fast* one (I’m looking at you MD5…) password_hash(“rasmuslerdorf”, PASSWORD_DEFAULT)
Though Argon2 is up and coming!
strong session ID don’t store anything but pseudo random ID in the cookie. Again NEVER TRUST USER INPUT! bin2hex(openssl_random_pseudo_bytes(50))
no session fixation on logout, delete cookie **and** server side entry in DB so session is dead dead dead NA
re-prompt for passwords on email, password or username change or when showing/changing sensitive data NA
no SQL injection still NEVER TRUST USER INPUT, parameterize all queries $dbh = new PDO(…);
$stmt = $dbh->prepare(‘SELECT * FROM users where username = :username’);
$stmt->execute( array(‘:username’ => $_REQUEST[‘username’]) );

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