9 Common Web Application Vulnerabilities and Control Measures to Fix Them

Web application vulnerabilities and control is a hot topic as any kind of vulnerabilities in web applications leave you prone to security attacks. This kind of critical exposures and security lapses cause critical risks to valuable customer and company data. This blog curates some common web application vulnerabilities and control measures that make your web design and web development projects stay safe from any kind of weaknesses.

The joy and excitement of building and deploying web applications can be short-lived if you fail to identify a vulnerability before an attacker finds it! Sounds scary, right? The presence of critical vulnerabilities in a web applications is one of the biggest fears for development managers. These vulnerabilities also lead to huge financial and reputation damages to website development companies. It is essential to join hands with an efficient website development or web application development company to offer a secure and sound digital experience to your customers.

This blog on web application vulnerabilities and control illustrates the web application vulnerabilities mentioned in the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) and measures to prevent them.

The most common web application vulnerabilities

1. Injection flaws

Injection flaws are when an intruder uses untrusted, unfiltered, and malicious data to attack databases or directories associated with your web apps. The most common attacks are SQL injection attacks in a meaningful effort to gain access to the database. LDAP injection attacks to get access to directories is the second most common injection flaw.

The best way to shield against injection flaws is to dodge accessing external interpreters to the best. This can be done by adding filters.

SQL injections can be prevented by using prepared statements to prevent attackers from influencing queries. LDAP injections can be prevented by using properties like escape variables to avoid characters used with injection attacks from being passed to manipulate the directory. These techniques will keep your web development project under tight security.

2. Broken Authentication

Authentication is the crucial step that helps apps identify and validate users. Therefore, broken authentication or an inadequate implementation of authentication function gives easy access to attackers enabling them to act as targeted users. These kinds of lapses in web design and web development functions permit attackers to compromise a user identity and abuse a vulnerability.

The main causes of authentication vulnerabilities are wrongly hashed passwords, leaks in user account data, wrongly set timeouts, brute force attacks, usual password stuffing like password1 or admin1234, and so on.

Vigilant use of off-the-shelf or custom authentication and session management mechanisms can be great ways to fix it. You can start with defining and documenting the policy of a site regarding handling users securely.

Defending your web application from authentication susceptibilities can be achieved by:

• Using multi-factor authentication to verify the correct user
• Creating strong passwords with periodic password updates
• Finely configuring timeouts and password security within your database

3. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

This attack happens when an application sends suspicious data to a client browser without authenticating. XSS lets an impostor perform scripts in the victim which stalk user sessions and redirect users to malicious websites.

Sanitizing input is the best way to fix XSS vulnerabilities. Your web application should execute vigorous checks against defined specifications. Corroborating and escaping user input will help prevent wicked injections.

You need to draft a positive security policy that outlines what elements should be allowed. Check OWASP’s Cross-Site Scripting cheat sheet here. This is a great resource to have insights into web application vulnerabilities and control.

4. Insecure Direct Object References

Insecure references to the direct object arise when database keys or files get exposed to the user. It happens when the administrator unintentionally leaks an internal implementation object like a directory or file. The external-internal objects allow attackers to use enumeration attacks to access those objects and gain data or access to critical databases.

Evading divulging referencing objects to users using easy to validate indirect methods would be the best prevention policy. Server-side input validation is a recognized way of referencing application objects. A user must be ratified before using a direct referencing object.

5. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Cross-site request forgeries (CSRF) use social engineering to hoax genuine users into clicking a link. This is a serious threat to any web design and web development projects. Attackers can take control of the sessions and can perform changes and do data theft. Invaders send requests to the vulnerable web application in the form of forged HTTP requests. These requests contain the session cookie of prey and other identifying info.

The best way to prevent this web application vulnerability is to ensure that applicants not only trust tokens from browsers but also use custom tokens that will not be recollected by browsers to initiate a CSRF attack.

All web design and web development projects should see to it that the following strategies are implemented.

• Ensure the application is not vulnerable to XSS attacks
• Re-verification and transaction signing can be used in very sensitive data transactions to ensure that the request is unpretentious.
• Do not use GET requests on critical data or for executing value transactions

6. Security Misconfiguration

A properly configured application environment is the best way to sustain a secure environment. The initial step to tackle security misconfiguration is to toughen the web server and application server. The configuration is applied to all application hosts as well as development environments.

The safest and most viable practice is to use an already recognized hardening guidance available from vendors or various security organizations such as OWASP or CERT. You can customize them to fit your specific needs.

See to it that your hardening guidelines comprise the following:

• Security mechanisms configuration
• Switching off unused devices
• Initiate accounts, roles, and permissions including altering the default password and disabling default accounts
• Logs and alerts

After shaping a guideline, it will be used to fix and maintain the servers. An automation tool can be used to mechanize the configuration process, particularly when a large number of servers is involved.

7. Insecure Cryptographic Storage

Insecure Cryptographic Storage vulnerability happens when an application flops to encrypt sensitive data or encrypt data with poorly designed older cryptographic algorithms. This may include the use of inapt ciphers, frail encryption methods, and poor key handling.

Everything that involves encryption must be checked and it should be done properly. Confirm proper handling of cryptographic material by checking the following:

• Use only sanctioned hashing algorithms such as AES, SHA-256, and RSA
• Sidestep weaker algorithms such as MD5/SHA1
• Evade transmitting private keys over insecure channels.
• Keys should be produced offline and stored with care
• Make decryption of data stored on disks tougher for attackers
• Infrastructure credentials such as database details are to be correctly encrypted

These are the best measures to fix the web application vulnerability of insecure cryptographic storage.

8. Failure to Restrict URL Access

If your web application fails to properly restrict URL access, security can be compromised through a method called ‘forced browsing’. Forced browsing causes the attacker to collect sensitive data through a web browser by requesting specific pages, or data files. Developers trying to hide functionality from a user by creating “hidden” pages can make a failure to restrict URL access situations.

The best way to prevent this web application vulnerability and control measure is to create a matrix that maps application roles and functions. Applications should configure access controls on every URL. It’s not adequate to check authorization once and leave it unchecked in subsequent steps.

You can prevent this attack by:

• Ensuring the access control configurations
• Safeguarding protection of business functions and all URLs to verify the user’s roles before any processing by using a smart access control mechanism.
• Performing a penetration test before deployment to ensure that the application is free from vulnerabilities
• Ensuring that library files are not incorporated in the web root folder
• Knowing that users are aware of hidden URLs and therefore ensure the protection of administrative functions
• Restricting access to some file types that might never be served by your application.
• Keeping XML processors and word processors which handle user-supplied data up to date.

9. Insufficient Transport Layer Protection

Insufficient Transport Layer Protection is a security flaw produced by applications that do not take any measures to protect network traffic. During authentication, applications may use SSL/TLS, but they often fail to utilize it elsewhere in the application. It thus leaves data and session IDs exposed.

Ensure transport layer security by these means:

• All authentication traffic is secured using SSL
• Support for strong algorithms only
• Browser doesn’t transmit session cookies in clear because they all have their secure flags
• The certificate of the server is genuine and is well-constructed for that particular server.
• SSL for private web pages to boost site performance

Web applications have the skill of relaying and forwarding users to other web pages. The following helps you discover if an application has unvalidated redirects and links:

• Analyzing all redirect and forwarding code to validate that parameters contain only allowed destination or destination element
• Spidering the site to check if it contains redirect links. If the HTTP response code is 300–307, check whether the parameters supplied seem to contain a target, change the URL of the target and check if the site will forward to another site
• For unavailable code, all parameters should be checked to validate whether they belong to a redirected URL destination and test the URLs that do

Implement the following to remain on the safer side:

• Curb the usage of redirects and forwards
• If used, control the usage of user parameters in destination calculation
• Make sure that the value supplied for a user is valid and authorized if destination parameters cannot be avoided

Wrapping Up

I hope this article has brought into light the critical web application vulnerabilities and suggested some of the most fundamental solutions. Most of the system flaws in a web-based application can be fixed with the help of experts. Get in touch with expert website development and web application builder, GetMySites, to build a web application that has reinforced security factors.