There’s a lot of acronyms there, so I guess I should start by explaining what I’m talking about! Certificate Authority (CA) A Certificate Authority (CA) is where you go in order to get the certificate for your website, whatever flavour you prefer. They have the power to generate a certificate for any domain, which is…
Your website should be secure (yes, you!)
So you’ve got a small website, maybe a blog or local company website, and you don’t collect any personal data or accept credit card payments, so you don’t need to worry about going secure and using HTTPS, right? Wrong! Every website should be secure. All of them. Yes, yours! Confidentiality The first reason that you…
HSTS preloading
For a while now, my website has been using HSTS. HSTS stands for HTTP Strict Transport Security, and essentially it’s a response header that your server sends back with your website to tell that browser that in future, this page should always be requested securely (via HTTPS). I talked about it briefly last year in…
Sonarwhal via the command line
I recently posted about Testing your website with sonarwhal, a great dynamic analysis tool that you can simply enter your website address into, and they’ll scan and return a report. What I failed to mention (shame on me) is that you can also run this tool via the command line. That’s right, they’re on npm as sonarwhal too. Install It’s…
Testing your website with sonarwhal
Yesterday I was watching a great Pluralsight course called Play by Play: Javascript Security by Troy Hunt and Aaron Powell. In this course they discuss a number of security related things, including auth tokens, caching, service workers, third-party library vulnerabilities and client-side validation. Aaron also introduced me to a tool that I hadn’t heard of before, called sonarwhal. If you’re…
Updating npm to latest version
Recently I had some trouble updating npm to the latest version on Windows, which was driving me crazy until a StackOverflow thread pointed me in the right direction. Unfortunately I can’t find the thread again, but as this was just a passing comment and not an answer, I thought it would be worth immortalising it here. By…