Top 6 security best practices for Angular apps

It's common to be concerned about security vulnerabilities in frontend frameworks. While Angular is the most preferred frontend framework among the developers for developing single-page applications, there are still security threats that need due attention for protecting Angular apps.

Keep these top 5 security best practices at hand when building Angular apps.

Prevent XSS vulnerabilities (Cross-site scripting)

To prevent the injection of scripts into DOM elements such as authentication details, social security numbers, web tokens, etc.

To prevent these malfunctions, use the InnerHTML property to sanitizes all the data that shows in components. But one should bind it to use to keep Angular alert enough to sanitize malicious activity-related strings. This interprets data as HTML in its context and is sanitized. It sanitizes the server-side responses before having them displayed on the HTML side.

Use of Javascript Sanitizer

The use of angular-sanitize script sanitizes the inputs by parsing the HTML into tokens. These are now safe tokens and can be serialized back to an escaped HTML string. This practice prevents unsafe inputs from breaking into the returned string. One can use ng-sanitize when the HTML input is dynamic or comes from the client input.

Prevent HTTP related vulnerabilities

Cross-site request forgery and cross-site script inclusion are considered the most common security vulnerabilities in Angular applications.

These attacks are made by users who send malicious requests to an application and attackers who use vulnerable scripts to break the code. These vulnerabilities can be overcome by adding a custom request header using similiar authentication tokens. This will make the client read the cookies along with adding a custom header and reject the requests from attackers.

To eliminate cross-site script inclusion, one should avoid using a third-party script from untrusted domains since they are most prone to weak security and easily intruded by hackers by adding executable code into scripts and trespassing the essential information.

Avoid template engines on the server-side templates.

Avoid mixing Angular's by-default templating engine with backend environments like Nodejs' template engines such as EJS or Handlebars.

Try to avoid template engines to create or add template data on angular server-side rendering.

Avoid using native DOM APIs for HTML elements.

Instead of directly using DOM for interacting with HTML elements, one should use Angular templates and default Angular APIs to manipulate the DOM. Since the usage of built-in DOM APIs doesn't protect applications from security vulnerabilities since it contains third-party APIs, and using them is unsafe.

Use of AOT template compiler

AOT template compiler prevents the whole class of vulnerabilities that come under template injection and improves app performance. The default compiler used by Angular CLI and using it in all production deployments can save you from security threats related to template injections.

Apart from the above-mentioned Angular security best practices, you can look at this Angular vs Bootstrap comparison, which compares crucial aspects of these front-end frameworks along with the security of apps.