What are the characteristics of a truly secure website?

The correct management of user permissions, the regular updating of software or the use of cryptographic protocols are some characteristics of a truly secure website.

Web applications are one of the main access routes for attackers who want to compromise an organization’s security, access unauthorized confidential information managed by the organization or undermine its reputation. Their high exposure makes them the perfect prey for malicious actors who wish to open a web security breach and exploit it, potentially triggering extremely serious incidents.

It is, therefore, essential to emphasize the development of prevention strategies that reinforce web security and, from the outset, work to prevent these episodes from taking place or minimize the frequency with which they occur, thus reducing the magnitude of their possible consequences.

The following are the keys to the main characteristics of a truly secure website.

1. Acronyms that inspire trust: HTTPS and TLS/SSL

The web address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is usually the first element of a page that the user looks at when quickly checking whether it has any of the characteristics of a truly secure website. Scrutinizing the domain or the specific name of the page is usually accompanied by a visual tour to the beginning of that sequence of characters, hoping to find the letter combination ‘HTTPS.’

If we come across it, the feeling of relief is immediate: it is common knowledge that the HTTPS acronym is one of the main characteristics of a truly secure website. In fact, those pages that do not contain this abbreviation are marked by browsers as not secure. But why does this happen?

The term HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It is an evolution of the standard HTTP protocol which, as its name indicates, carries out a secure transfer of the data exchanged between the client (generally the browser) and the web server. This transmission is protected thanks to the application of encryption that encodes all the information exchanged, with another abbreviation coming into play to complete the tandem: the TLS/SSL protocol.

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the update of the SSL (Secure Socket Layers) cryptographic protocol and is today the most commonly used encryption certificate. In fact, the SSL protocol was replaced by TLS 1.0 as a standard in 1999, but some older implementations still use the SSL nomenclature as a generic term.

This duplicity of protocols, therefore, makes it possible to increase the privacy of user data since encrypting all transmitted information becomes unreadable to attackers who try to intercept it, making it one of the characteristics of a truly secure web.

2. Regular updates and security patches

It is no secret that malicious actors are constantly analyzing the network and scrutinizing the latest cybersecurity trends to discover unknown vulnerabilities or new ways to exploit pre-existing ones.

Therefore, one of the main characteristics of a truly secure website is the constant updating of its software, plugins and operating systems, as well as the regular inclusion of changes or improvements in the code of the web application through the implementation of security patches.

These measures are essential when designing cybersecurity strategies based on prevention, since, in a continuous manner over time, they help to correct possible development errors, protect the web from known vulnerabilities and reinforce security against emerging threats.

In addition, a recurring, scheduled update can optimize web performance and efficiency, while enabling certain businesses to comply with security regulations that require regular system updates, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

3. Data Validation and Sanitization

For a website or application to meet all the characteristics of a truly secure website, measures must be implemented to ensure secure, efficient, and quality user input and output.

This is achieved through the implementation of two different processes, which coexist in a close relationship:

• Validation. This process allows for verifying whether the incoming data provided by the user complies with the requirements or pre-established rules before being accepted and processed by the web application. This involves the review of parameters such as format, range, or length of information such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, dates, etc.
• Sanitization. Like the previous process, this technique makes it possible to ensure that the input data is in a secure and appropriate format before being used on the web. But, unlike validation, sanitization involves removing or modifying potentially harmful or unwanted characters and output encoding (HTML encoding, JSON encoding) to prevent code injection attacks.

Keeping these two procedures in mind and applying them to web input processes increases the application’s resistance to vulnerabilities based on input data manipulation, such as XSS attacks or SQL code injection.

• XSS or cross-site scripting attacks consist of introducing malicious code by attackers into the web application itself, aiming to steal information from users accessing it.
• SQL injection is another type of cyberattack related to this type of vulnerability, in which malicious actors use input forms to access the database of web applications, thus hijacking confidential information and having the opportunity to modify or even delete it.

Protecting against this type of attack, defined by OWASP as one of the most dangerous cybersecurity threats for web applications every year, is essential to maintaining good data hygiene, one of the main characteristics of a truly secure website.

4. Application of secure protocols for login.

Another feature of a truly secure website is the use of robust protocols that ensure that users who want to access the website are who they say they are and that their permissions are well-defined.

This requires two different protocols to come into play: authentication and authorization.

4.1. Authentication

On the one hand, authentication processes have the task of verifying the identity of users, ensuring that no other entity can gain access with their credentials improperly or fraudulently.

The authentication method par excellence is the password, but since its implementation, an endless list of vulnerabilities has been forged that compromise its effectiveness. Fortunately, encryption techniques such as hashing and salting greatly increase the strength of passwords, reducing the ability of malicious actors to guess or crack them.

Still, to ensure that a site or application meets all the characteristics of a truly secure website, it is advisable to use additional authentication methods, such as the use of OTP (Time Passcodes), two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA). By including more elements to be verified in the equation, the chances of suffering an authentication attack can be considerably reduced.

4.2. Authorization

On the other hand, authorization defines a list of web resources that the user can access and their permissions according to their level of privileges.

This is normally controlled when programming the web, establishing a scheme of access controls and a meridian system of permissions assigned as roles. The best way to ensure that the site in question has the characteristics of a truly secure website in terms of the authorization process is to apply the principle of “least privilege assignment” by default.

This greatly reduces security breaches and their consequences by limiting access to sensitive actions to the appropriate users.

Conclusion: Implementation and maintenance

In short, when it comes to protecting the security of a web application, every precaution is welcome. Implementing all available prevention mechanisms and ensuring that they are regularly updated is the key to a properly protected website.

In addition, when in doubt, performing analyses such as a website security audit is always a good idea to determine whether the site or application in question meets all the characteristics of a truly secure website.