Input sanitization
Input sanitization is a critical practice in software development aimed at cleaning and validating user inputs to prevent security vulnerabilities and protect against various attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other injection attacks. The goal of input sanitization is to ensure that the input data is safe and does not contain malicious code or characters that could compromise the application’s security. It is crucial to store data securely once it is input so that it remains sanitized. We will address this in the database security chapter.
Here are fundamental principles and techniques for input sanitization in software development:
- Filtering and validation - Filtering removes or disallows any characters or patterns not expected in the input. Validation ensures that the input adheres to expected formats, lengths, and constraints. It is crucial to consider outliers in input that are still valid, such as hyphenated names...
