Security Hardening

Security Hardening

Apply code-level security best practices to reduce attack surface and improve security posture.

Prerequisite: Consider running /security-audit first to identify what needs hardening.

Instructions

1. Security Assessment and Baseline

   • Scan the codebase for existing security controls
   • Identify potential vulnerabilities: hardcoded secrets, missing validation, insecure defaults
   • Review authentication and authorization mechanisms
   • Review data handling and storage practices
   • Verify: List all identified vulnerabilities with severity ratings before proceeding

2. Authentication and Authorization Hardening

   • Implement strong password hashing (bcrypt, argon2) if not already present
   • Configure secure session management with proper timeouts and rotation
   • Set up role-based access control (RBAC) with least privilege principle
   • Implement JWT security best practices: short expiry, proper signing, refresh token rotation
   • Add brute force protection: rate limiting on login endpoints, account lockout
   • Verify: Test login with invalid credentials to confirm lockout/rate limiting works

3. Input Validation and Sanitization

   • Implement comprehensive input validation for all user inputs (type, length, format)
   • Use parameterized queries or ORM methods to prevent SQL injection
   • Apply output encoding to prevent XSS (context-aware: HTML, JS, URL, CSS)
   • Implement CSRF protection with tokens and SameSite cookie attribute
   • Add file upload security: type validation, size limits, rename on storage
   • Verify: Test each form/endpoint with malicious input samples (e.g., <script>alert(1)</script>, ' OR 1=1 --)

4. Security Headers Configuration

   • Set Content-Security-Policy header with restrictive directives
   • Set X-Frame-Options: DENY (or SAMEORIGIN if framing is needed)
   • Set X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
   • Set Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
   • Set Permissions-Policy to disable unused browser features (camera, microphone, geolocation)
   • Configure Strict-Transport-Security with max-age, includeSubDomains
   • Verify: Check response headers using curl -I or browser dev tools to confirm all headers are present

5. CORS Policy Hardening

   • Configure CORS with explicit allowed origins (never use * in production)
   • Restrict allowed methods and headers to what is actually needed
   • Set credentials: true only when required, with specific origins
   • Verify: Test cross-origin requests from unauthorized origins to confirm they are blocked

6. Secrets and Configuration Security

   • Move all hardcoded secrets to environment variables or a secrets manager
   • Add secret patterns to .gitignore (.env, *.pem, *.key)
   • Rotate any secrets that were previously committed to version control
   • Use different secrets for each environment (dev, staging, production)
   • Verify: Search codebase with grep -r for common secret patterns (API keys, passwords, tokens)

7. Data Protection and Encryption

   • Encrypt sensitive data at rest (PII, payment data, credentials)
   • Use secure key management: never store encryption keys alongside encrypted data
   • Implement proper password hashing with unique salts
   • Sanitize sensitive data from logs, error messages, and API responses
   • Verify: Review log output and error responses to confirm no sensitive data leaks

8. Dependency and Supply Chain Security

   • Audit all dependencies for known vulnerabilities (npm audit, pip-audit, bundle audit)
   • Update vulnerable dependencies to patched versions
   • Pin dependency versions with lockfiles (package-lock.json, Pipfile.lock, Gemfile.lock)
   • Remove unused dependencies to reduce attack surface
   • Verify: Run vulnerability scanner after updates to confirm zero known vulnerabilities

9. Secure Error Handling

   • Configure error handling to never expose stack traces, internal paths, or system details to users
   • Return generic error messages to clients; log detailed errors server-side
   • Implement proper logging for security events (failed logins, permission denials, input validation failures)
   • Add structured logging with correlation IDs for incident investigation
   • Verify: Trigger errors in each endpoint and confirm responses contain no internal details

10. Security Testing and Validation

    • Add security-focused test cases: injection attempts, auth bypass, privilege escalation
    • Integrate SAST tools into the CI/CD pipeline (e.g., Semgrep, Bandit, ESLint security plugins)
    • Configure dependency vulnerability scanning in CI (e.g., Dependabot, Snyk)
    • Create a security checklist for code reviews
    • Verify: Run the full test suite and SAST scan to confirm all checks pass