Secure Your Laravel Website. Here Are 5 Best Ways

Laravel has become a household name in the community of developers. Thanks to it being one of the most stable PHP frameworks. It has been widely used to develop websites and web apps for businesses.

But whatever gets popular often becomes a source to carry out malicious intent. And Laravel is no exception. With the rise of cybercrime, Laravel websites too have taken the hits.

But the good news is that Laravel offers the solution to it as well. Laravel community is ever-growing and they are coming up with a better and better version of it regularly. The latest one is Laravel 9 which was released in Feb 2022.

By using proper practices, you too can create a strong wall of defense against cyber attacks and secure your Laravel website from hackers. Here are 5 ways to do that: -

1. Prevent broken authentication

The situation when hackers can compromise passwords, keys, user account information, etc. to assume their identity is called broken authentication. It happens due to poor design and poor implementation of security measures. But it can be easily prevented by: -

• Using Google reCaptcha to let it identify if there is something fishy and prevent auto-generated web attacks.

• Adding multilayer security with two-factor authentication.

• Limiting the number of unsuccessful login attempts one can make in a single session.

2. Use the latest version of Laravel and PHP

Any new technology that comes into the market is never its best version. It always has many loopholes. But as people start using it, they find its shortcomings. Thus the developers are quick to fill those to create a better and more stable version of it.

That is why you should update to the latest Laravel and PHP version as soon as it arrives. This will ensure that your website has the least possible loopholes to be exploited by hackers.

3. Prevent SQL injection

SQL injection has become a common way among hackers to gain access, misuse, alter, and even delete the data residing in your database. They insert a malicious SQL statement into form fields to get unauthorized access and maliciously use your data.

Preventing it is important because there may lie some very sensitive data like email address, credit/debit card number, phone number, etc. If you spill it, you may even lose your credibility.

Chill! There is a way to prevent it from happening - By using PDO binding provided by Laravel. PDO binding ensures that no variable gets into database without validation. Take the following example: -

Route::get('this-is-prone-to-sql-injection', function() {
        $name = "'ancy' OR 1=1";
        return DB::select(DB::raw("SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = $name"));
});

This piece of code is inviting the hackers to exploit it as the statement 1=1 used in the OR condition will result in returning all the rows in the user’s table. But it can be prevented if you use this code: -

Route::get('safe-from-sql-injection', function() {
      $name = "'ancy' OR 1=1";
      return DB::select(DB::raw("SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = ?", [$name]));
});

Laravel replaces the question marks with the query, automatically escaping the input variables. This protects the query from SQL injection attacks.

4. Use inbuilt Laravel security features

Laravel comes with a lot of inbuilt security features that are easy to implement in your own Laravel website. One of such security features is an authentication system.

The majority of the part of it is already done for you by the Laravel framework. Depending upon the requirement, you can give access only to the required data to the user. This prevents your data to be revealed to those who don’t have the authority.

5. Reduce Laravel vulnerabilities from CSRF

CSRF stands for Cross-Site Request Forgery. Hackers have been using this technique for a long time. What happens is that hackers sometimes may get successful in compelling you to take any action that you do not want to perform. For example - clicks.

They may find a way around the policy that prevents two websites from interfering with each other. This can lead to changing data like email address and password or even transfer of money. Depending upon the access hackers can get, the worst-case scenario is they being able to get administrative control of your system.

Laravel helps you to create CSRF tokens automatically and keep track of each active user session. CSRF token helps the system to know whether the request is made by the original user or someone else.

These are the 5 main ways to make your Laravel website secure. Of course, you can also take some additional steps for website security to make it even more powerful against hackers.

Are you looking to develop your Laravel website from scratch? Do you have an existing website that you would like to optimize? Then, Acquaint Softtech is here to help you out.