DJANGO SECURITY BEST PRACTICES YOU NEED TO KNOW
Tags: django, webdev, python, programming
Published: 2023-01-16 02:51:55

Django is a popular web framework that is known for its robust security features. The framework is equipped with security tools, detailed documentation on security, and a team of dedicated developers who are responsible for addressing security issues.

Django provides several built-in security features that include:

Cross-site scripting (XSS) protection: This feature helps to prevent malicious scripts from being injected into web pages viewed by other users.

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection: This feature helps to protect against unauthorized actions by ensuring that requests are only accepted from trusted sources.

SQL injection protection: This feature helps to protect against SQL injection attacks, which occur when an attacker is able to insert malicious SQL code into a web application's database.

Clickjacking protection: This feature helps to prevent attackers from overlaying a website with a transparent layer, tricking users into clicking on a link or button that they did not intend to.

Support for TLS/HTTPS/HSTS, including secure cookies: This feature ensures that data transmitted between the server and the client is secure and protected from eavesdropping.
Automatic HTML escaping: This feature helps to prevent cross-site scripting attacks by automatically escaping special characters in HTML.

An expat parser hardened against XML bomb attacks: This feature helps to prevent XML bomb attacks, which can cause a web application to consume a large amount of resources and crash.

Hardened JSON, YAML, and XML serialization/deserialization tools: These tools help to prevent unauthorized access to data that is serialized or deserialized, such as JSON or XML.
To ensure that your production site is secure, it is important to follow some best practices. One of the most important things to keep in mind is to turn off DEBUG mode in production. When DEBUG mode is on, it can reveal sensitive information about your production setup to attackers. To turn offDEBUG mode, you should set ALLOWED_HOSTS or risk raising a SuspiciousOperation error.

Another important practice is to keep your secret keys secret. If the SECRET_KEY setting is not kept secret, an attacker may be able to gain control of other people's sessions, reset passwords, and more. To keep your secret keys secure, you should not keep them in version control. Instead, you should use environment variables to protect them.

Another best practice is to use HTTPS everywhere. Your entire site should be behind HTTPS, including your site's static resources. If visitors try to access your site via HTTP, they should be redirected to HTTPS. This can be done either through configuration of your web server or with Django middleware. One tool of choice for projects on Django for enforcing HTTPS/SSL across an entire site through middleware is the built-in SecurityMiddleware. To activate this middleware, you should add it to the settings.MIDDLEWARE definition and set settings.SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT to True.

You should also use secure cookies to inform the target browser to never send cookies unless it is HTTPS. To do this, you should set SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE and CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE to True in your settings.

In production, you should also use allowed host validation by setting ALLOWED_HOSTS in your settings to a list of allowed host/domain names. This is a security measure to prevent the use of fake HTTP host headers to submit requests.

When using forms that modify data, it is important to always use CSRF protection. Django comes with built-in CSRF protection that is activated across the site