Top 5 ReactJS Vulnerabilities and How to Protect Your Application Against Them

React is among the most popular tools that incorporate JavaScript to help developers build applications. It is extremely versatile and can be used in various instances to build high-quality user interfaces. But since it is fast and convenient, it is easy to overlook the security measures that need to be put into place for the application to be safe.

Cybersecurity has become more important than ever, with security threats skyrocketing.

Cybercriminals can penetrate 93% of networks in 2022, showing how vulnerability has increased. Moreover, 83% of small and medium-sized companies are not equipped financially to recover from a cyber attack.

You need to be aware of the vulnerabilities in React JS and how to take care of these issues.

Top 5 React JS Vulnerabilities and How to Solve Them

Your React.JS developer needs to be able to avoid React JS vulnerabilities like the following.

5. Server-Side Rendering

SSR is one of the best advantages of React. It enables a faster load time and better performance and makes incorporating SEO easier. But it also makes apps more vulnerable to attacks. SSR allows attackers to tap into vulnerabilities in third-party NPM packages.

“JSON.stringify,” a lightweight data-interchange format used to set an app state, doesn’t recognize sensitive data.

Using the serialize-javascript package and regular expressions are two of the fixes for server-side rendering issues.

4. Sensitive Data Exposure

A mismatch of APIs can result in accidental data decryption. Sensitive data from your React application may also be exposed if you have a poorly composed protection protocol or an unreliable security layer.

Collecting user data for auto-filling forms should be disabled. The encrypted algorithm version should also be updated regularly to prevent exposure to sensitive data.

3. Broken Access Control

Attackers can take over multiple accounts if authentication is implemented poorly in web applications. This way, they can access the same features of the app that a user would. Unprotected credentials, sessions without timeouts, easy-to-guess passwords, and exposing the session ID are the common reasons for this kind of attack.

Some of the best ways to protect your application are:

• Enable multi-factor authentication for all users.
• Put a session ID timeout into place to prevent leaving accounts unprotected.
• Enforce strong passwords for all users, which are not easy to guess.
• Start a new session every time that a user tries to log in.

2. DDOS

Distributed Denial of Service attacks causes an app to become inaccessible to regular users. An inability to conceal IPs is one of the main reasons behind DDOS attacks. Some common forms of DDOS threats are:

• HTTP flooding – which can result in the app being shut down permanently.
• Ping of death – overflows the memory buffer.
• ICMP flooding – responsible for making the ReactJS app much slower.

CAPTCHAs and JS tests are one of the first measures of safety that developers should implement. The coder should also sweep the entire app during and after the development process is complete. This will help detect any DDOS threats beforehand.

Unwanted users should not be able to access the internal code of the program. By restricting access to the source code, you can minimize the number of DDOS threats dramatically.

1. XSS

Cross-site scripting can exploit most of the bugs in ReactJS. Such attacks can inject malicious code into the application, which is its unique aspect. This is carried out by injecting a script, which checks the app for confidential info. The script tells the attacker when a weak point is found, which can be further exploited.

There are two main kinds of XSS attacks:

• Stored XSS: These are much more harmful to programs and result from persistent injections.
• Reflected XSS: A malicious script is replicated in the browser in this kind of XSS.

URL parsing, Blocklist validation, and conducting safelists are some ways to protect the app. Developers should also employ Web Application Firewalls that filter based on a signature to prevent XSS attacks.

Conclusion

Keeping security issues to a minimum is one of the make-or-break aspects of a modern app. Its why developers must pay attention to eliminating vulnerabilities in their code. This way, they can maximize usability and protect users and their date using ReactJS apps.