9.7 Summary

In this chapter, we’ve described CSRF, XSS and SQL injection based attacks. Most web applications are vulnerable to these types of attacks due to a lack of adequate input filtering on the part of the application. So, in addition to introducing the principles behind these attacks, we’ve also introduced a few techniques for effectively filtering user data and preventing these attacks from ever taking place. We then discussed a few methods for securely storing user passwords, first introducing basic one-way hashing for web applications with loose security requirements, then password salting and encryption algorithms for more serious applications. Finally, we briefly discussed two-way hashing and the encryption and decryption of sensitive data. The purpose of this chapter is to help readers become more conscious of the security issues that exist in modern day web applications. Hopefully, it can help developers to plan and design their web applications a little more carefully, so they can write systems that are able to prevent hackers from exploiting user data. The Go language has a large and well designed anti-attack toolkit, and every Go developer should take full advantage of these packages to better secure their web applications.