Why laravel is said to be highly secured framework in web application development?

Techno Kryon

Web Applications are dynamic web sites combined with server side programming which provide functionalities such as interacting with users, connecting to back-end databases, and generating results to browsers.

Client Side Scripting: Client Side Scripting is that is executed or interpreted by using browsers.

Server Side Scripting: Server Side Scripting is the type of code that is executed or interpreted by the web server.

Laravel is a popular framework in development platform that is well known for performance and the active user community. However, no framework could claim to be fully secured, but there are always a way to improve the security of the laravel apps.

Security is one of the important accepts of managing web application. If there is a new security threat looming, it assures the user that their data is secured. It helps in creating adaptable and customizable web applications with inbuilt tools of laravel. Laravel’s default authentication provides encryption to password generated during the installation of laravel. The encryption key uses encryption and cookie classes to generate secured encrypt type strings. it supports and protect your cookies by using a hash and making sure that no one tampers with them.

Various mechanisms to secure website using laravel are:

·         Laravel Authentication System

·         Cross Site Request Forgery

·         SQL Injection

·         Protection against XSS (Cross Site Scripting)

·         Protecting Routes

·         HTTP Basic Authentication

Laravel Authentication System                                                       

Laravel already has user authentication process in place with the associated boilerplate code available in the scaffoldings. Laravel use both providers and guards to facilitate in order to authenticate process. Where guards is to authenticate users for user request they make, and providers facilitates to retrieve back the users from the database.

Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

CSRF token is to make sure that external third parties can not able to generate a fake request and should not breach the security. In which laravel creates and integrates a valid token into every request that comes from a form through an AJAX call. When the request is invoked, it compares the request token with the saved user session. If the token doesn’t match, then the request is classified as invalid and no further action will get execute.

SQL Injection

Laravel provide another ways of talking to databases, such as raw SQL queries. Yet, eloquent remains the most popular option and that will learn how to use the ORM because it helps prevent SQL injection attacks caused by malicious SQL queries.

Laravel eloquent ORM uses PDO binding that protects from the SQL injections. This feature ensures that client cannot modify the content of SQL queries.

Protection against XSS (Cross Site Scripting)

At the time of XSS attack, the attacker enters JavaScript into your website. Whenever new visitor get access the affected page of form, the script will be executed with malicious impact. Laravel offer a native support that will protect the code from XSS attack. This feature kicks in automatically and protects the database during the process.

Protecting Routes

Laravel routes are defined in your route files, and that are located in the routes directory. These files are automatically loaded by the laravel framework. The routes file defines routes that are for your web interface. In Laravel you have a default middleware auth which is shipped with in Laravel. These routes are assigned with the web middleware group, in which it provides features like session state and CSRF protection. The routes are stateless and are assign the api middleware group.

HTTP Basic Authentication

Laravel make authenticate implementation very simple. In which, almost everything is configured for developer out of the box. The authentication configuration file is located at confiq folder which contains several well documented options for the behavior of the authentication service. By default, laravel includes an App model in your app directory. This may be used with the default eloquent with authentication driver.

If your application is not using eloquent, developer can use the database authentication driver where it uses the laravel query builder.

Conclusion

Application security is one of the most important concerns while developing a web application. For that every programmer has to use an effective ways to make it more secure. In which laravel takes care of the web application security within its own framework. It use hashed and salted password in which the password will never save as a plain text in a database. It is also using Bcrypt hashing algorithm in order to generate an encrypted type of password. Additionally, this PHP web development framework uses prepared SQL statements that make protect the injection attacks.