How To Secure Your Web App With HTTP Headers

POSTED April 12, 2017 IN:

HTTP headers are simply fields, encoded in clear text, that are part of the HTTP request

Why talk about HTTP headers? Web applications, be they thin websites or thick single-page apps, are notorious targets for cyber-attacks. In 2016, approximately 40% of data breaches originated from attacks on web apps — the leading attack pattern. Indeed, these days, understanding cyber-security is not a luxury but rather a necessity for web developers, especially for developers who build consumer-facing applications.

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Technically, HTTP headers are simply fields, encoded in clear text, that are part of the HTTP request and response message header. They are designed to enable both the HTTP client and server to send and receive meta data about the connection to be established, the resource being requested, as well as the returned resource itself.

HTTP response headers can be leveraged to tighten up the security of web apps, typically just by adding a few lines of code. In this article, we’ll show how web developers can use them to build secure apps. While the code examples are for Node.js, setting HTTP response headers is supported across all major server-side-rendering platforms and is typically simple to set up.

Enforcing HTTPS

Today, the importance of HTTPS is widely recognized by the tech community. More and more web apps configure secured endpoints and are redirecting unsecure traffic to secured endpoints (i.e. HTTP to HTTPS redirects). Unfortunately, end users have yet to fully comprehend the importance of HTTPS, and this lack of comprehension exposes them to various man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. The typical user navigates to a web app without paying much attention to the protocol being used, be it secure (HTTPS) or unsecure (HTTP). Moreover, many users will just click past browser warnings when their browser presents a certificate error or warning!

The importance of interacting with web apps over a valid HTTPS connection cannot be overstated: An unsecure connection exposes the user to various attacks, which could lead to cookie theft or worse. As an example, it is not very difficult for an attacker to spoof network frames within a public Wi-Fi network and to extract the session cookies of users who are not using HTTPS. To make things even worse, even users interacting with a web app over a secured connection may be exposed to downgrade attacks, which try to force the connection to be downgraded to an unsecure connection, thus exposing the user to MitM attacks.

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