Different ways used to prevent XSS are :
Escaping:
- What: Escaping means making sure that the data your application receives is safe before showing it to users.
- How: By censoring certain characters, like
<and>, you prevent them from being misinterpreted and causing harm. - Why: This helps to ensure that any potentially malicious characters in user input won’t be executed as code when displayed on a webpage.
Validating Input:
- What: Validating input ensures your application is displaying the right data and blocks malicious input.
- How: Whitelisting (allowing only known good characters) is better than blacklisting (disallowing known bad characters) because it stops both known and unknown threats.
- Why: Especially useful in forms, input validation prevents users from adding harmful special characters and rejects requests that don’t meet specified criteria.
Sanitizing:
- What: Sanitizing means cleaning user input to make sure it won’t cause harm.
- How: Scrubbing data clean of potentially harmful markup, especially on sites that allow HTML, ensures that the received data won’t harm users or databases.
- Why: While a strong defense, it’s best used in combination with other methods. It’s like giving the input a thorough cleaning to remove any potentially harmful elements.