Best Practices to secure your NodeJS Application, or Micro-service Development
As part of my recent series of Best Practice articles, we continue to look at how to deliver efficient, effective and secure applications using NodeJs, Full Stack Development.
This series pulls together a number of guides, details that we have used through out the years. Its designed to be easy to consume, and right for leaders, business owners and non-technical product owners ( where possible! ) to drive, lead and deliver Best Practice.
Introduction
The use of Node.js in application and micro-service development enables you to create high performance, scale-able applications with minimal effort. However, risks remain, and it is essential as part of securing your services that developers use best practices to ensure that applications and Micro-Services are secure. The following high level overview provides a summary of the best practices for securing Node.js applications or micro-services, and should be used as part of your checklist to ensure your application designs are meeting your threats and security posture.
- Use the latest version of Node.js
Ensure that your environment is up-to-date with the latest security patches. This ensures that any known vulnerabilities are patched, reducing the attack surface available to malicious actors. It is also important to ensure that only necessary dependencies are installed on your system as these can also introduce security vulnerabilities if not properly managed.
2. Input validation and sanitization.
All user input should be validated before being used and any potentially dangerous inputs should be sanitised or rejected altogether. This can help prevent various types of injection attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS). Additionally, all user input should be filtered to remove any potentially malicious code before being used within the application or service.
3. Encrypted Communications
It is essential that all communication between components of a Node.js application or micro-service are secured using encryption protocols such as TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer). This ensures that all data exchanged between components remains confidential and cannot be intercepted by malicious actors during transmission over the internet. Additionally, authentication protocols such as OAuth should be used when appropriate in order to verify the identity of users before granting them access to sensitive parts of an application or service.
4. Access Control
Access control measures should implemented whenever possible in order to restrict access based on user roles and permissions. This helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive areas of an application or service as well as helping prevent privilege escalation attacks where malicious actors gain additional privileges beyond what they were initially granted ( when logging into a system ). Logging is also important to provide valuable insight into potential security issues, identifying suspicious activity within an application or service before it becomes a major problem.
5. Monitor, Scan, Review
Finally, it is important to regularly monitor an application or service for potential security issues as well as scan with vulnerability scanning tools to help identify any potential weaknesses ( which exist in an code base ). This can help ensure applications remain secure even when new vulnerabilities are discovered in third-party libraries or frameworks used by the application code base itself.
Summary
These best practices provide an overview on where development teams, application architectures and project owners should focus to ensure their applications remain secure against threats ( both internal and external sources ). Through the proper implementation of these best practices, teams can keep their applications as safe as possible from malicious actors who may try and exploit vulnerabilities ( for data theft or disruption of services ).
Integrating these into your design reviews and architecture assurance activities will help reduce your risks, meet your obligations and ensure you have completed the right steps to ensuring ‘Due Care’ in securing your systems and data.
For more Blogs and Post on ‘Best Practices’ : https://www.cloud-dog.io/blogs/
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