The Laravel Security Checklist (Sponsor)

At Sqreen, we’re on a mission to help developers build more secure applications. But security is hard. It’s not always obvious what needs doing, and the payoffs of good security are at best obscure. Who is surprised when it falls off our priority lists? We’d like to offer a little help.

We created a Laravel Security Checklist to provide some guidance and to cover the best practices on securing your Laravel applications. Here are 10 tips from the checklist to get you started:

Code

✔ Filter and Validate All Data

Laravel’s Eloquent ORM uses PDO parameter binding to limit SQL injections. But Laravel also offers other ways to craft SQL queries. Regardless of where the data comes from, whether that’s a configuration file, server environment, GET and POST, or anywhere else, do not trust it. Filter and validate it!

Validation in Laravel

✔ Invalidate Sessions When Required

After any significant application state change, such as a password change, password update, or security errors, expire and destroy the session.

✔ Store Passwords Using Strong Hashing Functions

Ensure that all passwords and other potentially sensitive data are hashed, using robust hashing functions such as bcrypt. Don’t use weak hashing functions, such as MD5 and SHA1. Laravel comes with a native hash mechanism using Bcrypt and Argon2. Use them!

✔ Use Laravel’s built-in encryption

Laravel comes with a built-in encryption mechanism and we highly recommend you use that one instead of building your own. As of PHP 7.2, older encryption libraries have been deprecated, such as Mcrypt. However, PHP 7.2 supports the far better Libsodium library instead. If you want to use a different encryption library, take a look at Libsodium.

Infrastructure

✔ Check Your SSL / TLS Configurations

Ensure that your server’s SSL/TLS configuration is up to date and correctly configured, and isn’t using weak ciphers, outdated versions of TLS, valid security certificates without weak keys, etc, by scanning it regularly.

✔ Rate Limit Requests to Prevent DDoS Attacks

To stop users attempting to perform brute force login attacks and overwhelm your forms, use tools such as Fail2Ban to throttle requests to acceptable levels.

✔ Log All The Things

Regardless of whether you’re logging failed login attempts, password resets, or debugging information, make sure that you’re logging, and with an easy to use, and mature package, such as Monolog.

Protection

✔ Send All Available Security Headers

There are several security headers that you can use to make your websites and web-based applications more secure, for minimal effort. These include HSTS, X-XSS-Protection, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, and a Content Security Policy. Ensure that they’re being configured correctly and sent in your request responses.

✔ Have a Content Security Policy

Whether you have a one page, static website, a large static website, or a sophisticated web-based application, implement a Content Security Policy (CSP). It helps to mitigate a range of common attack vectors, such as XSS.

✔ Monitor your application security

Monitor your application security for suspicious behaviors and attacks. Knowing when your application is starting to get attacked is key to protect it before it’s too late.