🔍 Input Validation & Output Encoding
Ensuring only properly formatted input is accepted is critical. Use allow-lists and regex-based checks to validate form entries, file uploads, and API parameters. Learn more about input validation on Wikipedia.
- Server-side validation: Mandatory for security enforcement.
- Client-side validation: Improves UX but should never be solely relied upon.
Normalization: Standardizes input before processing. Output encoding: Prevents content from being interpreted as code. Learn more about output encoding on OWASP.
📜 Security Response Headers
- HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security): Forces HTTPS-only access. Learn more about HSTS on Wikipedia.
- Content-Security-Policy: Blocks inline scripts and resources not from trusted sources. Learn more about CSP on MDN.
- Cache-Control: Controls how pages are stored on shared browsers. Learn more about Cache-Control on MDN.
💡 Secure Coding Practices
Write code that fails safely and never exposes internal logic to users. Avoid:
- Stack traces in error messages
- Unvalidated redirects or form values
- Use of deprecated functions or insecure APIs
Encourage code modularity, limit dependencies, and minimize external library usage. Validate any third-party SDKs before integrating. Learn OWASP.
🧪 Code Analysis
- Static Analysis (SAST): Scans source code for vulnerabilities before deployment. Learn more about SAST on Wikipedia.
- Manual Review: Peer reviews help uncover logic flaws or risky practices.
- Dynamic Analysis (DAST): Tests running applications in staging environments.
- Fuzz Testing: Inputs random/broken data to detect validation failures and crashes. Learn more about fuzz testing on Wikipedia.
🧠 Memory & Resource Protection
- Buffer overflow: Prevent by bounds-checking all input and avoiding unsafe functions (e.g., strcpy).
- Memory leaks: Free all dynamically allocated memory once used. Monitor for unhandled exceptions.
- Race conditions: Synchronize access to shared resources across threads/processes. Learn more about race conditions on Wikipedia.
- Integer overflow: Ensure inputs stay within expected data types and ranges. More details about integer overflows on Wikipedia.