HTML - Security (Secure applications)

About

This article is about security when writing an application that shows HTML pages.

User content / Sanitizing User Input

HTML is a programming language that can download and run script.

Therefore, you should be extremely careful with user-input or HTML content created by your users.

If you:

• accept HTML, you might want to look into using Iframe with sandbox, but security is hard, and that doesn’t seem to be 100%.
• don't accept HTML, you need to sanitize it by:
  • escaping all HTML tag
  • or deleting script, iframe or style tag that are basic tag used in a attack

Configuration

• Add a CSRF token for all forms post request
• Add a CSP to define the resources that you accepts
• Add HSTS (HTTPS as mandatory).
• Add a X-Frame-Options HTTP response header to indicate that a browser should not be allowed to render a page in a frame, iframe, embed or object. More see Web Security - Clickjacking due to opening the style tag