E-commerce software design involves many challenges and risks, especially when it comes to security. Customers entrust their personal and financial data to online platforms, and expect them to protect it from hackers, fraudsters, and identity thieves. As a software engineer, how can you ensure security in e-commerce software design? Here are some best practices and tips to follow.
One of the most basic and essential steps to ensure security in e-commerce software design is to use secure protocols for data transmission and encryption. This means using HTTPS instead of HTTP, and SSL or TLS certificates to verify the identity and authenticity of the website. Secure protocols prevent attackers from intercepting, modifying, or stealing sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, passwords, or addresses.
The most important requirement is to delegate payment transactions to well trusted services like Stripe or PayPal. Also, e-commerce website shouldn't store any credit card related data. These are just basics when it comes to transaction handling.
Don't create your own protocol from low-level algorithms when there is a high-level protocol that will work (and is tested and proven and known). And especially don't write your own encryption or use an algorithm that hasn't been seriously peer-reviewed (over years, not months) as a part of the protocol you use. I've seen and argued against both of these approaches - to see hours of effort thrown away in the face of regulators and external standards.
Strong authentication and authorization mechanisms are essential for secure e-commerce software design. Authentication verifies the user's identity while authorization determines what actions they can perform on the website. To ensure robust security, techniques such as password hashing and salting, multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, and session management should be employed. Password hashing and salting will help protect against brute force attacks, multi-factor authentication will add an extra layer of security, role-based access control will limit access and privileges based on roles and responsibilities, and session management will control the duration and expiration of user sessions.
It is important to block or blacklist all IPs which are not permitted to access certain administration panels to avoid any bruteforce and guessing credential attacks which might lead to system compromise. Furthermore, it is vital to also apply rate limiting techniques to log in to a secured platform and apply CAPTCHA mechanisms to mitigate any bruteforce attacks
The quality and security of your code has a direct effect on the security of your e-commerce software design. To avoid common vulnerabilities and errors that can compromise your website, you should adopt secure coding practices. This includes validating and sanitizing user input to prevent injection attacks, escaping and encoding output to stop malicious code from running, implementing error handling and logging to detect and fix bugs and issues without revealing sensitive information, and testing and reviewing your code regularly to identify and eliminate security flaws.
Pay attention to security up front - design it in, code for it, test for it, talk about it. Think about all the layers and how you can protect each, so that they work together. Security is not just penetration testing, or system configuration, or platform choices - it's all these and more - don't try to simply bolt it on at the end of the development cycle. Practice Defense in Depth: Use Threat Modeling from the start of design and revisit it throughout development; Check for vulnerabilities in the libraries you you use - all of them - know their weaknesses (OWASP CycloneDX is one tool to help). Worry about the obscure up-front, such as behaviors of your API if too many parameters are provided.
Another way to ensure security in e-commerce software design is to update and patch your software regularly. This means keeping your operating system, web server, database, frameworks, libraries, and plugins up to date with the latest security fixes and enhancements. Updating and patching your software helps you prevent known vulnerabilities and exploits from affecting your website. You should also backup your data and code frequently to avoid data loss or corruption in case of a security breach.
When it comes to e-commerce software design, security is not only a technical issue, but also a human one. It's important to educate and train your staff and customers on the best practices and policies for security and privacy. For instance, you should provide clear information on how you collect, store, use, and protect customer data. Additionally, customers should be encouraged to use strong and unique passwords that are changed regularly, as well as multi-factor authentication. Furthermore, customers should be informed about the signs and risks of phishing, malware, and other online threats. Lastly, your staff should be trained on how to handle customer data, report security incidents, and follow security guidelines.
These trainings should be conducted at least twice a year with "dummy Phish drops" to practically and effectively test your staff. If they fail, they need to retake the training course.
I also find very useful to cut down the time allocated for the active session to timeout. It may come in handy with what one can do when a system has been idle for a specified amount of time.