Why Laravel is Recommended Framework for Critical, Secure Applications

Laravel makes the application secure by default and this is the reason which makes it the recommended PHP framework for critical applications.

Introduction

For critical applications there are mainly two things that are seen while ensuring the security one is the application it self and other is the server. As Laravel is a Development framework so we will not discuss server security here.

Laravel features allow you to use everything securely. Untill and unless you not writing raw queries. If you are doing this then you are on your own. The point is, Laravel gives you security for common vulnerabilities.

So here, you will learn about the most important security features of Laravel.

Protecting Laravel Applications from SQL Injection

Laravel protects you from SQL injection as long as you’re using the Fluent Query Builder or Eloquent.

Laravel makes the prepared statements which are going to escape any user input that may come in through your forms. If hackers add a new input to a form, they may try to insert a quote and then run their own custom SQL query to damage or read your application database. However, this won’t work since you are using Eloquent. Eloquent is going to escape this SQL command and the whole input will be treated as text into the database.

Protecting Cookies on Laravel Applications

Laravel also protects your cookies. For that, you will need to generate a new Application Key. If it’s a new project, use the PHP artisan key:generate command; however, if required, you can edit it from the application.php file under the Application Key section.

For existing projects running on Laravel 3, you will need to switch to a text editor, then go to your application’s config directory and open the application.php file. There, you will find the key under the Application Key section.

On Laravel 5 and above, Application Key is called Encryption Key. You can find this key in the app.php file that resides in the config folder.

The Application Key or Encryption Key uses encryption and cookie classes to generate secure encrypted strings and hashes. It is very important that this key should remain secret and not to be shared with anyone. Also, make it about 32 characters of random gibberish so that nobody can guess it as Laravel uses this key to validate the cookie.

The cookie class uses the Application key to generate secure encrypted strings and hashes. Laravel will protect your cookies by using a hash and making sure that no one tampers with them

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection on Laravel

To protect your application from a CSRF attack, Laravel uses the Form Classes Token method, which creates a unique token in a form.

The token ensures that the request is coming from your application and not from other. With that token, you need to make sure that it’s checking for a forged request. Laravel has CSRF-protection enabled by default.

You can add Laravel’s pre-defined CSRF filter in your app. The CSRF filter allows you to check for a forged request and if it has been forged, it’s going to return an HTTP 500 error.

Conclusion

There are other things you must do to protect your critical applications, such as disabling verbose error reporting to stop sensitive details about your application being made visible to a bad actor. Nevertheless, Laravel ensures a much more secure application by protecting again these common attack vectors.