Nowadays security becomes more important than the content and the SEO of a web application. Due to a lack of protection, the number of attacked websites augments in the past few years. In most of the cases, developers are either uninformed or unqualified to implement security during the application development, which causes a huge amount of data flaws.
Supporting the developers and easily managing the workflow, some organizations have developed different kind of guidelines for security integration. Such guide helps handling the security from the outset of the development process, which influence over the protection of the entire application. The one used in this article is a project developed by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation named OWASP Secure Headers Project. Its aim is to show the developers the balance between usability and security implemented through http headers. By giving general data and examples of HTTP response headers usability it is a platform which help increasing the security of the application.
In this article, we explain the necessity of HTTP Security Headers and how they can help in preventing a cyber invasion in our web application! We will give details on the most important HTTP headers and will retrieve a basic information for some with a lower need. We will give examples for their implementation in one ASP.NET web application to provide more descriptive perspective of their use!
In the recent years, browsers have integrated certain security header controls to support the web application security. Those headers give instructions to the browser how to behave when handling sensitive content and data of the application. If developers enable them in the application, browser will prevent attacks automatically. But not all browsers support them, which brings a compatibility question: what are the alternatives in a case of deprecated header on a specific browser.
As a part of the research we will provide an analyze of the use of the HTTP headers in some of the most common sites used in Bulgaria with the help of ALEXA Top 1 Million sites. There have already been developed a lot of applications to show if a certain website has HTTP security headers implemented. Most of them are freely to use and gives detailed information on what was done and what should be done in case that specific layer of security is missing from the web application.
The need of security in the web applications become more and more necessary. Along with other security implementations on a programming and on a server level the ones described in the article bring another layer of security management that mitigates certain types of cyberattacks and vulnerabilities.
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