Application Security Checklist: From Idea to Production
1 min read
Summary
Security engineer and freelancer, Ryan Gcox, shares his checklist for launching safe and secure side projects in a tech space that increasingly prioritises speed over safety.
His checklist, aimed primarily at indie hackers, solo developers and SaaS founders, includes storing sensitive data as environment variables, rather than hard coding them into an application; using hosted authentication solutions such as Supabase, NextAuth and Clerk for reliable, best-practice authentication and authorisation; and careful management of user sessions.
It also strongly advises implementing robust input validation, both on the client side and server side; rate limiting, generic error handling and the use of an API layer to keep the front end and application logic separated and secure.
The checklist also highlights the importance of keeping dependencies up to date, using encryption to protect data both in transit and at rest, and the addition of HTTP headers to improve security, with suggestions provided in this regard.