Best Practices

Implementing robust authentication and authorization is just the beginning of securing your application. There are several critical best practices you must follow. First and foremost is password hashing. You should never, under any circumstances, store user passwords in plaintext in your database. If your database is compromised, all user passwords will be exposed. Instead, you must use a strong, one-way hashing algorithm like bcrypt or Argon2. When a user signs up, you hash their password and store the hash. When they log in, you hash the password they provide and compare it to the stored hash. Another crucial practice is implementing rate limiting. This involves restricting the number of requests a user or IP address can make to your API in a given period. This is vital for preventing brute-force attacks on login endpoints and protecting your application from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. You must also enforce the use of HTTPS for your entire application. HTTPS encrypts the communication between the client and the server, preventing attackers from eavesdropping on sensitive data like passwords or session cookies. Other important practices include validating and sanitizing all user input to prevent injection attacks (like SQL injection and XSS), using secure, `HttpOnly` cookies for session tokens, and keeping all your software libraries and dependencies up to date to patch known vulnerabilities.