Carefully built and well-functioning security systems in web applications help businesses to stand strong and establish trusting relationships with their customers. Security systems prevent sensitive data leaks, help companies maintain their reputation, and minimize losses. Unfortunately, some businesses overlook the importance of security in their apps and run into long-lasting negative consequences. According to Check Point Software’s Security Report, “87% of organizations have experienced an attempted exploit of an already-known, existing vulnerability” in 2020.
Many companies try to minimize security weaknesses. For this, they search for reliable IT companies with extensive app development expertise and use the most effective and time-tested technologies for building their web applications. One of these technologies is React.js. In this article, we explain why to choose React.js for building your web application and how to secure React apps.
Stackshare states that React.js has 168.2K stars on GitHub with over 33.8K GitHub forks. More than 9600 companies use React.js in their tech stacks, including Uber, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instagram, and many others.
Any business web app involves extensive data exchange and connection to various sources. This helps businesses compete in the market and effectively provide services to their customers. On the downside, this high connectivity makes web apps prone to a wide range of security flaws and data breaches.
When building their web apps with React.js, web developers have to keep in mind that React.js has no default security settings. Therefore, they need to know how to handle the most widespread security issues that may appear in web applications.
The most common React.js vulnerabilities include:
Let’s have a look at the most common React.js vulnerabilities and best practices to prevent them.
Links to other resources become dangerous when hackers add a malicious code that starts with JavaScript to URLs. When a user clicks on a link, they activate the script in a browser. React.js app security doesn’t prevent the use of links without “HTTP:” or “HTTPS:” protocols and has no features to prevent the potential threats.
To avoid JavaScript in their links, web developers can:
The insecure connection between the web client and the server-side leads to broken authentication and user authorization issues. Hackers can interfere with the authentication and authorization processes and spoil user account data, passwords, session tokens, and other entities.
The most widespread React.js security risk factors related to broken authentication include:
To protect the HTTP basic authentication protocols, web developers need to:
Many web apps utilize server-side rendering when they display their web pages and content to the users. Server-side rendering has many advantages. It improves app performance, makes webpage loading faster, and ensures consistent SEO performance. Although, this type of page rendering can involve some security challenges.
When rendering an initial state of a web page with Redux, web developers can generate a document variable from a JSON string looking like this:
The JSON.stringify() can be a risky method as it converts any given data into a string and displays it on a web page. As a result, attackers can insert some malicious code inside the JSON string and eventually take control of a web app or its data.
To tackle this vulnerability, web developers need to:
This type of attack is aimed at the app’s databases. Attackers inject a malicious SQL code into a database and receive access to the stored information. By gaining the admin credentials they can edit, delete, or create new records.
There are various types of SQL injections such as error-based, time-based, and logical-error-based, and React apps are vulnerable to all of them. Therefore to minimize the number of SQL attacks, web developers can:
Zip Slip vulnerability happens when app users submit reduced in size zip files in React.js apps. When a web app decompresses such files it restores them to their initial size. Some of these files can include some hacker codes that provide attackers with access to the system.
Attackers can use this React.js vulnerability and overwrite the files responsible for app configurations and information storage. With Zip Slip, they can break into the app’s system on the client or server-side layers.
To eliminate the possibility of Zip Slip hacker attack, web developers can:
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a serious vulnerability that appears when attackers manage to trick a web app into launching a JavaScript code. Cross-site scripting can be divided into two forms:
It happens when a web app receives a malicious JavaScript code from a trustworthy source in the form of an HTTP request. And this code is processed by the app’s browser.
As a result, the malicious script gains access to cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive data from the browser. These scripts can also rewrite the HTML page content or execute unwanted actions that a user can perform.
Stored XSS comes from an untrusted source. A web app stores malicious content on a server or a database for later. When a user requests the stored data the script starts working on the server-side generating data and sending it to the user.
To defend their React.js-based apps from XSS attacks web developers can:
Many businesses with a worldwide reputation search for React development companies to build their web solutions. React.js is a robust and effective framework that helps to create fast, high performance, and rich in features web applications.
However, like any software development framework, React.js isn’t resistant to hacking 100%. Yet, web developers can introduce some measures to reduce the number of malicious attacks to a minimum.
Here is a quick summary of the most useful practices web developers can follow to build effective security systems in their React.js application: