Chapter 4. Mitigating Vulnerabilities

In Chapter 1, Introduction to Software Security, we already discussed the most important vulnerabilities that can be exploited in order to compromise your application. Now, you need to learn what measures you can take in order to address these vulnerabilities and make your application more secure. What easy steps can be taken in order to achieve this?

This chapter will show you how to mitigate vulnerabilities. Removing or at least treating vulnerabilities will significantly reduce the risks of your system. We'll begin by learning how to validate input fields. We'll also learn how to avoid code injection, especially the most common one: SQL injection. We'll then see recommended practices when handling user credentials and we will learn how to make our components more secure in order to avoid vulnerabilities in the interapplication communications.

The topics that will be covered in this chapter are as follows: