Good Guide For Web App Security?

Question

I am pretty good on making web applications and I know how to transfer data to and from client/server, etc. I need some help though learning how to make the data exchanges more secure. That is the reason why I feel kind of scared to publish any web app I make. I wanted to know what are some good guides to help you understand and learn how to secure data transfer with your web application? Things like better authentication for example and making better logins.

You can post any suggestion, but just for your information, I mainly code my web apps with Javascript and PHP. Also, I transfer my data using JSON or XML.

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

OWASP has a great selection of guides, example projects and test applications on the subject web application security.

My personal favourite is the backend security project, which I used to prove to my manager that our internal systems needed a lot of attention, and just because backend security wasn't a user-perceived benefit, didn't mean it could be ignored.

This project in particular gives some good advice for data validation, error handling, cryptography etc.