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title: Cyber Security Month 2016 gittime: off date: 2016-10-01 template: blog summary: The best time to upgrade the security on my projects!
As it's Cyber Security Month, now's the perfect time to work on improving the security on my websites, projects, and servers. But, upgrading them for now isnt good enough for me, I want to add a way of scanning projects automatially during unit tests, to check for any new vulnerabilities.
As most of my projects revolve around NodeJS and Python, these are the languages i'll be concentrating on.
Express Server
Express is one the most popular JS servers, and fortunately, they have a security guide, that contains some of the best ways to secure your server. One of the best and simplest ways is to add the helmet middleware, which contains a load of other middlewares that drastically increase its security. It's incredibly easy to add too, at just 3 lines of change, like this!
You can use securityheaders.io to check if any headers are being sent by your server that shouldnt be. As well as see how you can improve.
NodeJS Dependencies
One of the best and fastest ways to keep secure is make sure your dependencies are secure. If your code is secure, but one of your dependencies isnt, it wastes all your hard work! Fortunately theres a tool to check this, nsp. It checks the Node Security Project for known vulnerabilities in your dependencies, and reports them.
If you don't want to add nsp to your dependencies, they offer a CI service for GitHub which will run the checks for you on their own servers.
Checking for updates
Generally, keeping things up to date is a good thing, fortunately, there's a website for that! Upload you package.json to npm.click, and it'll tell you what's out of date!
Python Code
Any of the projects I work on that are more advance that a simple static server, I use Django, written in Python. Checking your python code itself is nice and simple thanks to bandit. It checks your code to make sure youre writing it properly, and are catching errors. It can check the dependancies too, but it takes a very long time, and you can't change the code in there, there isnt much point.
Dependencies?
There is a tool, dependancy-check that supposidly checks the security of python dependancies, but it didnt want to work for me, except display the help menu, which is useful.
Although, you check for updates to your dependancies with pypiup. Working in much the same way as npm.click (and written by the same person), except it's a CLI instead of website.
Checking
To check your hard work has made a difference, seositecheckup contains a helpful section on security, as well as securityheaders.io. I've enabled these tricks on my website, so you can see their results here for securityheaders and seositecheckup.