9 Tools to Secure NodJS Application from Online Threats

Node.js, one of the leading JavaScript runtime, is capturing market share gradually.

When anything becomes popular in technologies, they are exposed to millions of professionals, including security experts, attackers, hackers, etc.

A node.js core is secure, but when you install third-party packages, the way you configure, install and deploy may require additional security to protect web applications from hackers. To get an idea, 83% of Snyk users found one or more vulnerabilities in their application. Snyk is one of the popular node.js security scanning platforms.

And another latest research shows ~14% of the whole npm ecosystem was affected.

In my previous article, I mentioned finding security vulnerabilities in a Node.js application, and many of you asked about remediating/securing them.

So here you go…

Snyk

Snyk can be integrated into GitHub, Jenkins, Circle CI, Tarvis, Code Ship, Bamboo to find and fixes the known vulnerabilities.

You can understand your application dependencies and monitor real-time alerts when risk is found in your code.

On a high-level, Snyk provides complete security protection, including the following.

• Finding vulnerabilities in the code
• Monitor code in real-time
• Fix the vulnerable dependencies
• Get notified when a new weakness impacts your application.
• Collaborate with your team members

Snyk maintains its own vulnerabilities database, and currently, it supports Node.js, Ruby, Scala, Python, PHP, .NET, Go, etc.

Jscrambler

Jscrambler takes an interesting, unique approach to provide code & web page integrity on the client-side.

Jscrambler makes your web application self-defensive to fight fraud, avoid code modification in run-time, data leakage, and protect from reputational loss and business.

Another exciting feature is application logic, and data is transformed so that it’s hard to understand and hidden on the client-side. This makes it difficult to guess the algorithm, technologies used in the application.

Some of the Jscrambler featured include the following.

• Real-time detection, notification & protection
• Protection from code-injection, DOM-tampering, man-in-the-browser, bots, zero-day attacks
• Credential, credit card, private data loss prevention
• Malware injection prevention

Jscrambler supports most JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, Ionic, Meteor, Vue.js, React, Express, Socket, React, Koa, etc.

So go ahead and give a try to make your JavaScript application bullet-proof.

Cloudflare WAF

Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) protect your web applications from the cloud (network edge). You don’t have to install anything in your node application.

There are three types of WAF rules you get.

• OWASP – to protect an application from OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities
• Custom rules – you can define the rule.
• Cloudflare specials – Rules defined by Cloudflare based on application.

By utilizing Cloudflare, you don’t add security to your site and take advantage of their fast CDN for better content delivery. Cloudflare WAF is available in the Pro plan, which costs $20 per month.

Another cloud-based security provider option would be SUCURI and StackPath, a complete site security solution to protect from DDoS, malware, known vulnerabilities, etc.

Helmet

Helmet is a middleware for express and Koa to provide OWASP best practices secure header. It let you implement HTTP response headers such as HSTS, CSP, Referrer-Policy, Expect CT, etc.

Sqreen

Get it started in less than 5 minutes; Sqreen is deployed within your code to protect your application and users from intrusions, attacker.

Sqreen is a lightweight agent built for performance to provide complete security, including the following.

• SQL/No-SQL/Code/Command injections
• Owasp Top 10
• Cross-site scripting attacks
• Zero-day attacks

Not just Node.js, but it supports Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, Go as well.

Sqreen uses collective intelligence to detect an early attack by taking advantage of data coming from other applications.

N|Solid

N|Solid is a drop-in replacement platform to run a mission-critical Node.js application.

It got inbuilt real-time vulnerability scanning and custom security policies for enhanced application security. You can configure to get alerted when a new security vulnerability is detected in your Nodejs applications.

Rate Limit Flexible

Use this tiny package to limit the rate and trigger a function on the event. This will be handy to protect from DDoS and brute force attacks.

Some of the use cases would be as below.

• Login endpoint protection
• Crawler/bot rate limiting
• In-memory block strategy
• Dynamic block based on user’s action
• Rate limiting by IP
• Block too many login attempts

Wondering if this will slow the application?

No, you won’t even notice that. It’s fast; the average request adds 0.7ms in the cluster environment.

CSURF

Add CSRF protection by implementing csurf. It requires a session middleware or cookie-parser to be initialized first.

Needle.sh

Needle.sh SDK is like in-app WAF to protect NodeJS and Python applications from more than 10 security common attacks.

With the help of inbuilt insight, you can understand the insecure code and notify when there is a security incident. You can get it started in FREE with up to 50,000 requests monthly.

Conclusion

I hope the above list of security protection helps you to secure your NodeJS application.

Next, don’t forget to check out the monitoring solution.