Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fourth Edition

By : David Herron
Book Image

Node.js Web Development - Fourth Edition

By: David Herron

Overview of this book

Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform using an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model allowing users to build fast and scalable data-intensive applications running in real time. This book gives you an excellent starting point, bringing you straight to the heart of developing web applications with Node.js. You will progress from a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript and server-side development to being able to create, maintain, deploy and test your own Node.js application.You will understand the importance of transitioning to functions that return Promise objects, and the difference between fs, fs/promises and fs-extra. With this book you'll learn how to use the HTTP Server and Client objects, data storage with both SQL and MongoDB databases, real-time applications with Socket.IO, mobile-first theming with Bootstrap, microservice deployment with Docker, authenticating against third-party services using OAuth, and use some well known tools to beef up security of Express 4.16 applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Using good cookie practices


Some nutritionists say eating too many sweets, such as cookies, is bad for your health. Web cookies, however, are widely used for many purposes including recording whether a browser is logged in or not. 

In the Notes application, we're already using some good practices:

  • We're using an Express session cookie name different from the default shown in the documentation
  • The Express session cookie secret is not the default shown in the documentation 

Taken together, an attacker can't exploit any known vulnerability stemming from using default values. All kinds of software products show default passwords or other defaults. Those defaults could be security vulnerabilities, and therefore it's best to not use the defaults. For example, the default Raspberry Pi login/password is pi and raspberry. While that's cute, any Raspbian-based IoT device that's left with the default login/password is susceptible.

But there's a bit more we can do to make the single cookie we're using, the...