9 PWA Security Practices to Safeguard From Cyber Threats

Some effective PWA security practices include HTTPS and SSL/TLS implementation, reliable user authentication, certificate pinning, up-to-date security protocols, RASP solutions, and strict content review protocols. Incorporating these solutions in the app is the best way to protect the application from the most common and harmful security risk, data breach.

For example, Meta (Facebook) witnessed a data breach in 2021 where the personal information (like profile bio, birthdate, full name, previous location, and relationship status) of 533 million users was stolen and leaked on a hacking forum for free.

Preventing such legally and financially harmful security threats requires the expertise and assistance of an Application Security Manager (ASM) and a small or big team of security engineers, depending on your application.

Application security managers and engineers have the necessary training required to safeguard a progressive web app from various security threats like cookie hijacking (session hijacking), cross-site scripting (XSS), data breach, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), injection attacks, broken access control, cryptographic failures, unauthorized and non-consensual redirects or forwards, security misconfigurations, and insecure direct object references (IDOR).

Hiring them can help you build established and reliable platforms like well-known PWA apps such as Tinder, Twitter, Pinterest, and Starbucks by preventing damaging PWA security threats, which can lead to customers. Consequently, it will make it easy for you to benefit from the rapidly growing progressive web app market (Its value is estimated to reach $10.44 billion by 2027).

Keeping that in mind, here you can learn about several highly effective security practices to understand how to protect a PWA-based platform and business.

9 PWA Security Best Practices

The most crucial thing to remember about PWA security is that they always have vulnerabilities if you do not regularly implement new protocols, update them, and test their capabilities toward system security. And as mentioned above, you must hire an application security manager (ASM) in your PWA development team to incorporate the security protocols effectively.

Implement Secure and Tested Authentication

Poor authentication is a security vulnerability that leads to data theft and leaks in PWA applications. Avoiding this threat requires highly advanced authentication protocols like passwords, certificate-based authentication, multi-factor authentication, and biometric authentication. For that, you may use authentication APIs and follow the standards of Web Authentication (WebAuthn) and UAF.

Organizations using a PWA app for business operations and employee management can use identity and access management (IAM) solutions for authentication. It will enable them to limit and compartmentalize access to the PWA app according to their positions/titles. Such solutions prevent unauthorized access and protect sensitive/confidential information from leaking or falling into the wrong hands.

Use HTTPS and SSL/TLS

Sending, receiving, processing, and managing data is a crucial function of many progressive web apps. Therefore, securing this process is essential to protect customer and organizational data from theft and leakage. HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) enables secure communication and data transmission between a web browser and a web server using encryption, preventing unauthorized access and data security issues.

1. Over 82.7% of all websites currently use the HTTPS protocol.
2. HTTPS implementation requires the installation of SSL/TLS certificates on your PWA server.
3. Google, Facebook, and Youtube are among the top websites using HTTPS.
4. HTTPS offers Improved data security and protection from MITM and phishing attacks.

Similar to HTTPS, Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL or Certificate Pinning) are cryptographic protocols that improve the security of communications and data transmissions between applications, web browsers, and servers. You can use free or paid SSL certificates based on your budget. However, paid SSL certificates are usually more reliable and provide better validation and protection guarantee against data breaches than free certificates.

Use a Web Application Firewall (WAF)

With continuous monitoring and filtering, A web application firewall can protect a progressive web app from various security threats like malicious HTTP/S traffic, cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection attacks, file inclusion, cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and cookie poisoning. What makes WAF a uniquely effective solution is its ability to monitor, identify, and deal with security threats in real-time.

The top web application firewalls to choose from are:

1. Azure Web Application Firewall
2. Cloudflare WAF
3. AWS WAF
4. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)
5. F5 WAF
6. HAProxy WAF

Conduct Penetration and Security Testing

Penetration and security testing is the best way to evaluate the security of PWA applications. These testing solutions are necessary for building a PWA with top-of-the-line and reliable security protocols. However, QA engineers can conduct these tests before and after development from time to time to monitor, identify, and deal with security vulnerabilities before they turn into a threat. Penetration and security tests involve simulated cyber attacks against your application to evaluate the capabilities and vulnerabilities of its security protocols.

A recent cybersecurity survey found that 75% of organizations use penetration testing protocols for compliance, while 57% implement them for vulnerability management.

You need skilled and experienced QA engineers in your PWA development team to conduct these tests effectively. They will safeguard a PWA platform from several security issues that can cause many legal and financial problems (such as payment data and personal information theft/leaks).

Keep Security Protocols Up to Date

Every app can have security solutions for protecting user and organizational data. For example, Tinder has extensive security protocols for detecting, preventing, and dealing with security vulnerabilities. But these protocols can lose effectiveness with time due to changing security needs and an increased number of skilled hackers/cybercriminals. Such outdated, untested, and weak security protocols can lead to several security issues in a progressive web app (data theft/leakage being the most common).

OWASP recognizes Vulnerable and Outdated Components as one of the top 10 security risks in web applications. Therefore, a PWA app owner must regularly test the reliability of all its security solutions and update them, whether the security solution is a web application firewall or biometric authentication.

Penetration testing is a great way to ensure the reliability of old, new, and updated security solutions. It helps identify PWA security threats and vulnerabilities from the perspective of attackers/hackers.

Enforce Strict Content Review Protocols

Incorporate strict review protocols for all content (text-based, visual, and digital) that will be received, processed, and stored in the database of the progressive web app. App owners can use automated systems and manual protocols to conduct such content review protocols. They help identify potentially harmful/risky content from getting added to the PWA application database, which helps prevent and destroy various security threats at their roots.

You can get your application security manager and web content management system (Web CMS) manager to review and monitor all content on your progressive web app.

Incorporate Captcha Security and Secure Cookies

Captcha security protection has become a necessary solution due to the rise of bot attacks (malicious bots). It helps verify that the user accessing the progressive web app is an actual person and not a programmed/automated malware bot.

As mentioned above, all security solutions require updates and pen testing to confirm their effectiveness. And captcha security is a solution that will require more frequent updates and testing since the capabilities of bot attacks keep increasing with automation.

The easiest way to implement captcha security in your PWA platform is by creating a reCAPTCHA account.

Secure cookies help progressive web app owners protect user and organizational data through encryption and better authentication, preventing data theft/leakage and unauthorized access. You can check out the quick guide by OWASP to incorporate the secure cookie attribute in your PWA app.

Create a Content Security Policy (CSP)

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a standard that helps protect applications from security threats like cross-site scripting (XSS) and injection attacks. The policy helps control resources (like scripts and images) that can be allowed to load for a given page, depending on the sources of that content. CSP helps protect a PWA application from many easily overlooked security issues

and improves its overall performance.

A quick guide for CSP implementation:

1. Create directives, policies, or source values to determine which resources will your PWA platform allow or restrict.
2. Integrate CSP with HTTP response header.
3. Implement and enforce the content security policy with an HTTP header.
4. Or add your CSP through meta tags.

You can also check out some CSP examples for more information and guidance.

Implement RASP Solutions

Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) solutions can analyze applications (user behavior) and traffic to identify, report, and block threats that could lead to cyber-attacks. This solution will closely monitor the PWA application system to identify and report security vulnerabilities. It can help the app owner deal with security issues before they cause unrecoverable damage to the PWA platform.

For RASMP implementation, you may use widely recommended tools like Imperva, Fortify Application Defender, Signal Sciences, Hdiv, OpenRASP, and Contrast Security.

What makes RASP better than other security solutions is its focused approach toward behavior and traffic monitoring, which can reveal the causes of most security attacks in PWA applications. Real-time protection, increased transparency/visibility in application security protocols, improved accuracy, and zero-day attack prevention are well-known benefits of RASP solutions.

Conclusion

Incorporating various security solutions in a progressive web application will require the expertise of app developers, application security managers, and engineers. It is the only way to ensure the solutions can protect the application as effectively as necessary. An application security manager can evaluate the PWA app, implement new solutions, and update the old ones to meet the changing security requirements.

Other than that, a few other things you can do are - create a user-driven privacy policy and minimize excessive sensitive/confidential data in the progressive web app. Ambiguous/poor privacy policies and too much sensitive data create vulnerabilities, easily avoidable in almost any application.

In short, securing a PWA app is about consistency in ensuring and verifying application security, managing expectations, regular updates, and hiring app developers that follow a value and security-driven strategy.