Many companies and individuals develop their web applications by using React. In React, we have a lot of in-built npm modules to create user-friendly web pages. After developing a web application, many people come to the point of realization of react security.

Before starting a web project, we need to check for web application securities in SDLC Phase. To develop a secured react web project, we need some standards to define the react web application security.

What is OWASP?

OWASP is a non-profit organization that defines 10 standard sets of rules to develop a secure web application. The main goal of OWASP is to improve software security. Through open-source and conferences OWASP delivers the rules for web security.

How the rules will be defined in OWASP?

OWASP Top Ten is a standard awareness document for developers to follow web application security. It represents the most critical and common issues of web security. Using OWASP is the most effective step to

What are the rules or standards of OWASP?

• Broken Access Control:

Broken access control vulnerabilities exist when a user can in fact access some resource or perform some action that they are not supposed to be able to access.

For example, a web application might have an admin page, but there is no link to the admin page on other parts of the website, a regular user won't find the admin page by simply clicking around.

• Cryptographic Failures:

A cryptographic failure is a critical web application security vulnerability that exposes sensitive application data on a weak or non-existent cryptographic algorithm. Those can be passwords, patient health records, business secrets, credit card information, email addresses, or other personal user information.

• Injection:

An injection is an attacker's attempt to send data to an application in a way that will change the meaning of commands being sent to an interpreter.

The injection is used by an attacker to introduce (or "inject") code into a vulnerable computer program and change the course of execution. The result of successful code injection can be disastrous, for example, by allowing computer viruses or computer worms to propagate.

• Insecure Design:

Insecure design is the lack of security controls being integrated into the application throughout the development cycle. This can have wide-ranging and deep-rooted security consequences as the application itself are not designed with security in mind.

• Security Misconfiguration:

This vulnerability will occur when a web component is suspectable to attack due to misconfiguration or insecure misconfiguration.

These misconfigurations are in software components or in user administration. For example, if we use default passwords for the system, it may allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to the system.

• Vulnerable and Outdated Components:

  It refers to when the open-source code has software vulnerabilities or is no longer maintained. This code can include Libraries, frameworks, etc.

If we don't provide the security patch to the software component that is vulnerable to attack.

• Identification and Authentication Failures:

Identification and authentication failures can occur when functions related to a user's identity, authentication, or session management are not implemented correctly or not adequately protected by an application.

There are 4 types of authentication that can be used to prevent data breaches: 1. Password-based authentication 2. Multi-factor authentication 3. Token Authentication and 4. Biometric Authentication.

• Software and Data Integrity Failures:

  Software and data integrity failures relate to code and infrastructure that do not protect against integrity violations. An example of this is where an application relies upon plugins, libraries, or modules from untrusted sources, repositories, and content delivery networks (CDNs).

• Security Logging and Monitoring Failures:

Failure to sufficient log, monitor, or report security events, such as login attempts, makes suspicious behavior difficult to detect and significantly raises the likelihood that an attacker can successfully exploit your application

Why is it important?

Logging and monitoring will help you to identify patterns of activity on your networks, which in turn provide indicators of compromise. In the event of incidents, logging data can help to more effectively identify the source and the extent of the compromise.

• Server-Side Request Forgery:

Cross-Site Request Forgery is an attack that forces an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application in which they're currently authenticated.

Tools for testing OWASP?

There are many tools which are available to test web application security. One of the most common tools is ZAP Tool. The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy-to-use integrated penetration testing tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications. It Provides automation testing and manual testing methods to test the web applications.

Summary:

Plan Your OWASP testing in SDLC Phase. Through OWASP, we can identify the most critical security risks of web applications. By using the ZAP tool on your browser, we can able to identify the security risks and their prevention mechanisms earlier.