WPE Security Checklist and Guidelines

The following list is targeted at developers and engineers looking to ensure they have taken satisfactory security measures when creating applications, services, and tools.

THE SECURITY MINDSET
  •  Question the architecture and design.
  •  Practice best case security by trying to exploit the tool or application you are building.
  •  Security is not a single fix; facilitate building layers of defenses.
  •  Understand current security trends and attack patterns.
  •  Intimately become familiar with the OWASP Top 10
  •  Change your password at a regular interval, and use a zero knowledge password manager.
  •  Become aware of your surroundings; especially when working remote at coffee shops or hotels.
  •  Always assume the worst when connecting to public services; use encryption, masking, and alerting.
AUTHENTICATION SYSTEMS
  •  Use HTTPS everywhere.
  •  Store password hashes using Bcrypt (no salt necessary – Bcrypt does it for you).
  •  Destroy the session identifier after logout.
  •  Destroy all active sessions on reset password (or offer to).
  •  Must have the state parameter in OAuth2.
  •  No open redirects after successful login or in any other intermediate redirects.Al
  •  When parsing Signup/Login input, sanitize for javascript://, data://, CRLF characters.
  •  Set secure, httpOnly cookies.
  •  In Mobile OTP based mobile verification, do not send the OTP back in the response when generate OTP or Resend OTP API is called.
  •  Limit attempts to Login, Verify OTP, Resend OTP and generate OTP APIs for a particular user. Have an exponential backoff set or/and something like a captcha based challenge.
  •  Check for randomness of reset password token in the emailed link or SMS.
  •  Set an expiration on the reset password token for a reasonable period.
  •  Expire the reset token after it has been successfully used.
USER DATA & AUTHORIZATION
  •  Any resource access like, my cart, my history should check the logged in user’s ownership of the resource using session id.
  •  Serially iterable resource id should be avoided. Use /me/orders instead of /user/37153/orders. This acts as a sanity check in case you forgot to check for authorization token.
  •  Edit email/phone number feature should be accompanied by a verification email to the owner of the account.
  •  Any upload feature should sanitize the filename provided by the user. Also, for generally reasons apart from security, upload to something like S3 (and post-process using lambda) and not your own server capable of executing code.
  •  Profile photo upload feature should sanitize all the EXIF tags also if not required.
  •  For user ids and other ids, use RFC compliant UUID instead of integers. You can find an implementation for this for your language on Github.
  •  JSON Web Tokens (JWT) are awesome. Use them if required for your single page app/APIs.
ANDROID / IOS
  •  salt from payment gateways should not be hardcoded.
  •  secret / auth token from 3rd party SDK’s should not be hardcoded.
  •  API calls intended to be done server to server should not be done from the app.
  •  In Android, all the granted permissions should be carefully evaluated.
  •  On iOS, store sensitive information (authentication tokens, API keys, etc.) in the system keychain. Do not store this kind of information in the user defaults.
  •  Certificate pinning is highly recommended.
SECURITY HEADERS & CONFIGURATIONS
  •  Add CSP header to mitigate XSS and data injection attacks. This is important.
  •  Add CSRF header to prevent cross site request forgery. Also add SameSite attributes on cookies.
  •  Add HSTS header to prevent SSL stripping attack.
  •  Add your domain to the HSTS Preload List
  •  Add X-Frame-Options to protect against Clickjacking.
  •  Add X-XSS-Protection header to mitigate XSS attacks.
  •  Update DNS records to add SPF record to mitigate spam and phishing attacks.
  •  Add subresource integrity checks if loading your JavaScript libraries from a third party CDN. For extra security, add the require-sri-for CSP-directive so you don’t load resources that don’t have an SRI sat.
  •  Use random CSRF tokens and expose business logic APIs as HTTP POST requests. Do not expose CSRF tokens over HTTP for example in an initial request upgrade phase.
  •  Do not use critical data or tokens in GET request parameters. Exposure of server logs or a machine/stack processing them would expose user data in turn.
SANITIZATION OF INPUT
  •  Sanitize all user inputs or any input parameters exposed to user to prevent XSS.
  •  Always use parameterized queries to prevent SQL Injection.
  •  Sanitize user input if using it directly for functionalities like CSV import.
  •  Sanitize user input for special cases like robots.txt as profile names in case you are using a url pattern like coolcorp.io/username.
  •  Do not hand code or build JSON by string concatenation ever, no matter how small the object is. Use your language defined libraries or framework.
  •  Sanitize inputs that take some sort of URLs to prevent SSRF.
  •  Sanitize Outputs before displaying to users.
OPERATIONS & MANAGEMENT
  •  Check for machines with unwanted publicly open ports.
  •  Check for no/default passwords for databases especially MongoDB & Redis.
  •  Always use SSH key authentication when connecting to servers.
  •  Install updates timely to act upon zero day vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, Shellshock.
  •  Modify server config to use TLS 1.2 for HTTPS and disable all other schemes.
  •  Do not leave the DEBUG mode on. In some frameworks, DEBUG mode can give access full-fledged REPL or shells or expose critical data in error messages stacktraces.
  •  Test and understand the hosting providers DDOS migration strategies.
  •  Ensure the New Relic agent is running on all production systems.
  •  Verify syslog is configured and working correctly.
  •  Always enable encyrption on cloud services such as Amazon S3.
PEOPLE
  •  Limit access to “need to have”.
  •  Be polite to bug reporters.
  •  Have your code review done by a fellow developer and a resource from the security team.
  •  If you suspect a breach or data or privacy report immediately to the security team.
  •  Set up Netflix’s Scumblr to source sensitive information surrounding your organization.