Building Secure Shopify Apps

If you build a Shopify app, it's important to build security into your code. This can make your app less vulnerable to hackers, protect your store from data breaches, and help you avoid the costs associated with credit card fraud.

A common way that hackers attack Shopify stores is through brute force attacks. This can cause you to lose sales, customers' personal information, and your store's reputation.

Include Always Encode User Input Before Rendering It to the Page

Encoding is a key line of defense against XSS attacks. It prevents user-controllable data from being injected into the page in a way that doesn’t make sense to a normal user (injecting JavaScript or other harmful code), or it prevents unsafe characters from being passed to an output format such as HTML or CSS, which is also a common XSS attack vector.

However, encoding isn’t always the most effective protection against XSS. In many cases, the syntactical context in which data is processed when it’s received is unknown and encoding cannot provide reliable protection.

Often, this means that input that would otherwise be rejected by an input validation tool can actually be safely allowed, especially if it’s necessary for the functionality of the app or service. In these situations, you must be extremely careful to only allow data that you know is safe for the particular output context.

Some examples of this include allowing users to post HTML markup, constructing URLs with query string parameters or appending IDs to URLs. This is usually done only if there’s a legitimate business reason to do so and you can verify that the value is safe by examining it manually.

Avoid Direct DOM Access with User-Generated Content

If your eCommerce store requires user-generated content such as product images, reviews, and inventory data, you should avoid direct DOM access with these elements. This can help prevent malicious JavaScript from running on your website, which could lead to XSS vulnerabilities.

The DOM is a tree structure representation that allows web apps to access specific HTML elements and their values in code. This can be useful when you need to process a specific element's value, but it is also vulnerable to attacks that can alter the content or try to download malware.

When using dynamic data in a context where it can be rendered directly to the page, it's important to use a safe assignment property such as textContent. This helps to re-mediate DOM-based cross-site scripting, but it is still dangerous to include untrusted data in the output of your application's window object.

Rotate Keys Frequently

Rotating keys is an important security best practice that can help prevent compromise, reduce recovery time in the event of an attack, and ensure compliance with industry regulations. Additionally, it can increase confidence in your organization’s ability to protect sensitive data and improve customer trust.

Key rotation is the process of retiring an encryption key and replacing it with a new one. Typically, new data is encrypted using the new key, but old data continues to be encrypted with the previous key until it is modified.

This is an essential part of key management and should be a regular process. However, some organizations fail to rotate their keys due to the complexity of the process or the time required to perform a manual rotation.

Having an automated key rotation process for sensitive credentials such as API keys, passwords, and tokens is essential to ensuring that your Shopify app remains secure. For example, some API keys and passwords only need to be rotated every 60 days, but other credentials such as superuser accounts will need more frequent rotation.

Perform Automated Security Tests

If you're building a Shopify app, security is one of the most important aspects to consider. This is because you'll need to minimize access to sensitive data and ensure that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Automated security tests can help you test for these issues, and are an essential part of continuous integration and deployment pipelines. They also allow you to identify and fix memory bugs, input errors, performance-hindering issues, insecure behaviors, and undefined behavior.

Automated security testing tools can be used to perform static analysis, penetration testing, source code analysis, and security code review. They can help you integrate security testing into your DevOps environment without reducing productivity or compromising visibility.

Shopify Development Trends

Most Shopify store owners focus on their digital marketing alongside their web development. Keeping up with the cutting-edge Shopify Apps in ensuring a frictionless checkout for their online store, with additional tools to fill the Shopping Cart. Online shopping continues to grow year-over-year as the user experience improves with tailored customer service practices. Behind the scenes, are Shopify partners such as TheGenieLab. We are helping business owners and shopkeepers to drive continuous improvements through digital marketing services. Furthermore, they are providing Web Development in Shopify, BigCommerce, and other eCommerce store architectures. If you need a hand in any aspect of eCommerce, feel free to reach out to us at wish@thegenielab.com