XSS Prevention

Simple Definition for Beginners:

XSS prevention refers to the measures taken to protect web applications from cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. These measures involve validating and sanitizing user input, encoding output, and implementing security headers to mitigate XSS vulnerabilities.

Common Use Example:

A website employs XSS prevention techniques such as input validation and output encoding to ensure that user-submitted content cannot be used to execute malicious scripts on the site.

Technical Definition for Professionals:

XSS prevention encompasses a range of techniques and best practices aimed at mitigating the risk of cross-site scripting attacks. Key aspects of XSS prevention include:

• Input Validation: Validating and filtering user input to ensure that it does not contain malicious scripts or HTML tags.
• Output Encoding: Encoding user-generated content before rendering it in web pages to prevent script execution.
• Content Security Policy (CSP): Implementing CSP headers to control which sources of content are allowed to be executed on a web page.
• Sanitization: Removing or neutralizing potentially harmful content from user input before processing or displaying it.
• Client-Side Security: Using frameworks or libraries that automatically handle input validation and output encoding to reduce human error.