To sign up for our daily email newsletter, CLICK HERE
When it comes to developing web applications, security should be at the top of your list of priorities. Laravel is one of the most favored frameworks for PHP development. While it’s great for creating secure applications, there are a few features you need to know about to implement proper security measures.
This blog post will look at five of the most critical security features in Laravel. So if you’re new to Laravel, planning to hire dedicated Laravel developer for your company’s project, or want to make sure your application is as secure as possible, read on. The knowledge you’ll acquire won’t go futile.
Laravel is a well-known PHP development framework with a large active user base. This PHP backend framework is extremely fast out of the box and has a vibrant developer community. Although Laravel is secure by default, no framework can claim to be completely safe. There are always methods to improve the security of Laravel apps, but none are perfect.
Yet, the best thing about Laravel security is that the maintenance team addresses any flaws as soon as possible. As a developer, you should, however, concentrate on the security of your Laravel 5 application.
So, let’s start discussing the best Laravel security features:-
Laravel Authentication System
Laravel offers an intelligent user authentication procedure, which is already included in the scaffolding. To ease the authentication process, it employs “providers” and “guards.”
The role of “guards” is to authenticate users for each request they submit, while the part of “providers” is to allow retrieval of users from the database.
As a web developer, all you have to do is create your database, controllers, and models. Authentication capabilities are incorporated into the app during the process.
Protection against XSS (Cross-Site Scripting)
The attacker inserts JavaScript (usually into a form’s text areas) into your website during an XSS assault. The script will now be run with malicious consequences whenever new visitors to the affected form page access it.
Consider the situation of a blogging platform that enables visitors to leave comments on blog postings. Now, in this case, an attacker with malevolent intent enters the following JavaScript code in the comments:
<script>alert(“You are hacked”)</script>
With no XSS protection in place, the Laravel bugs will rise since the JavaScript will run each time the page reloads. While the example code itself is not harmful, it serves as an excellent illustration of how far this attack may go.
Laravel’s built-in XSS protection protects the code from XSS assaults. The functionality is activated automatically, and the database is protected. Any escape tags are therefore outputted as HTML, as shown below:
<script>alert(“You are hacked”)</script>
SQL Injection
As used by Laravel’s Eloquent ORM, PDO binding prevents SQL injections. This characteristic ensures that no client can interfere with the SQL queries’ intended purpose.
Consider the following example of a database form that solicits email addresses from users. For example,
“[email protected]” is one possibility for an email address. Consider the following scenario: the SQL query is changed to:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = ‘[email protected]’ or 1=1
In the example above, 1=1 is a simple logical expression that always evaluates to true. If the above query is linked with the OR condition, all records will be retrieved since the SELECT condition will become true.
Consider an alternate scenario in which the query is immediately changed to “drop table users” rather than
“[email protected].” The query will appear as follows:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = ‘[email protected]’; drop table users;
The table “users” will be deleted from the database when this query is run.
When the PDO parameter binding is active, the input will be in quotes, and the query will appear like this:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = ‘[email protected] or 1=1’
Because the email and “1=1” do not match, nothing will be returned by the query.
Laravel also supports raw SQL queries, which are another means of communicating with databases. Eloquent, on the other hand, continues to be the most popular choice. The ORM is beneficial since it aids in the prevention of SQL injection attacks caused by malicious SQL queries.
CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) to Reduce Laravel Vulnerabilities
Laravel uses CSRF tokens to ensure that third-party servers can’t generate fraudulent requests and that they don’t breach the security of your application.
For this, Laravel inserts a valid token into every request from a form or via an AJAX call.
When the request is made, Laravel compares the supplied request token to the one stored in the user’s session. The request is considered invalid if the tokens do not match. No further action is taken.
If you’re creating standard HTML forms manually with Blade templates (not recommended), you must include the CSRF token as follows:
<form name=”test”>
{!! csrf_field() !!}
<!– Other inputs can come here–>
</form>
Laravel Purifier To Strengthen Security
Laravel’s double curly braces prevent raw HTML from being passed to the customer. However, if you want to provide your customer with a variable from the database, a few approaches may help. HTML Purifier is a comprehensive maintained tool that will tidy up your code and handle absent and missing HTML codes.
Laravel Security Packages
Laravel has several security-focused packages available. While I can’t go through them all, the most popular Laravel security-related packages are as follows:
- Laravel Security Component: The Laravel security component, in its most basic form, merely extends protection for roles/objects and integrates Symfony’s security core with Laravel. It uses voters to check role-based permissions across several roles, demonstrating that the system is secure.
- Laravel-ACL: Laravel-ACL uses role-based secured permissions to safeguard the Laravel authentication process. The package aids in protecting routes and CRUD controller actions in applications.
- Laravel Security: One of the most utilized packages, ‘Laravel security’ is well-known for removing XSS flaws from the code. It’s been ported from Codeigniter 3 to Laravel 5.
Bottom Line
There are a lot of additional measures you may take to make your Laravel application even more secure. The framework manages to considerably increase the security of your application by eliminating these various attack factors through its most advanced built-in Laravel security features. These inherited functionalities assure that your website is safe from potential attacks.
While securing your website is essential, it’s also necessary to have peace of mind knowing that you have a team of Laravel web development experts who are certified to implement these mindful practices for the security of your Laravel web app. Feel free to connect with these agencies, as they will offer free consultation on even your most complex projects.
All the best.
