Web Security Guides
11 articlesWeb security is the foundation of every trustworthy application. A single vulnerability — an unescaped input, a misconfigured header, or a leaked API key — can expose user data, destroy brand reputation, and trigger costly regulatory penalties under GDPR, CCPA, and PCI-DSS. These guides cover the full spectrum of modern web security: from preventing cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) at the application layer, to implementing HTTP security headers (Content-Security-Policy, HSTS, X-Frame-Options) at the infrastructure layer. You will learn how to think like an attacker — understanding threat models, attack surfaces, and the OWASP Top 10 — so you can build defenses that actually work. Each article includes practical code examples, real-world vulnerability case studies, and step-by-step remediation guides that you can apply immediately to your projects.
What You'll Learn
- How to prevent XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, and other OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities
- Implementing Content-Security-Policy, HSTS, and other HTTP security headers correctly
- Password hashing best practices: bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2 — and why SHA-256 is wrong for passwords
- Secure authentication flows: JWT handling, session management, and OAuth 2.0 pitfalls
- HTML entity encoding, input sanitization, and context-aware output escaping
- SSL/TLS certificate management and HTTPS configuration for production deployments
Why This Matters
The average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million in 2023 (IBM Security). Most breaches exploit known vulnerabilities that proper security practices would have prevented. These guides give you the knowledge to build secure-by-default applications, pass security audits, and protect your users — without needing a dedicated security team.
All Articles
JWT Security: What's Safe to Decode, and What You Should Never Paste Online
A JWT is just Base64 — anyone can read it. How to inspect tokens safely, why pasting a live token into a random site is risky, and how signatures protect you.
Are Online PDF Tools Safe? Server Upload vs In-Browser Editing
What really happens when you upload a PDF to an online tool — server retention, breach exposure, jurisdiction — and how in-browser editing avoids it.
HTTP Security Headers: The Complete Checklist for Your Web App
An engineering guide to HTTP security headers: Content-Security-Policy, HSTS, and X-Frame-Options — and how they stop XSS, clickjacking, and MIME sniffing.
SSL/TLS Certificates: What Developers Should Know
SSL/TLS certificates explained: the TLS handshake, the chain of trust, Let's Encrypt/ACME automation, debugging intermediates, and hardening Nginx.
CORS Errors Explained: Why Your Fetch Call Fails and How to Fix It
A practical guide to CORS: the Same-Origin Policy, debugging OPTIONS preflight, the wildcard-plus-credentials paradox, and fixing it with a reverse proxy.
Password Security: Generation, Hashing, and Storage Best Practices
A guide to password security: information entropy, bcrypt vs Argon2id hashing, salting to defeat rainbow tables, and the current NIST guidelines.
API Rate Limiting: How It Works and How to Handle It
A practical guide to API rate limiting: how token buckets and sliding windows work, implementing them in Redis with Lua, and retry logic with backoff.
bcrypt vs SHA-256: Password Hashing Compared
Why SHA-256 is wrong for passwords and bcrypt is right: salting, key stretching, and modern password-hashing best practices with real benchmarks.
XSS Prevention with HTML Entity Encoding
The engineering guide to stopping XSS: context-aware HTML entity encoding, Content Security Policy nonces, DOM-based attacks, and Trusted Types.
Why Base64 is Not Encryption
Why Base64 encoding provides no security: how the algorithm works, the real Kubernetes/JWT misconceptions, and how to use AES-256-GCM and bcrypt instead.
Web Security: Encoding and Hashing Guide
Encoding vs hashing vs encryption: when to use Base64, SHA-256, bcrypt, AES, and HTML entity encoding for web security — with examples and decision trees.