Securing The Web Ecosystem in 2023 - A Year in Review by BoxyHQ
The year 2023 marked a turning point in web security, with the industry witnessing both groundbreaking advancements and formidable challenges. In our first newsletter edition we offer you an overview of the most news worthy and important happening in web security, enterprise security, open source, and at BoxyHQ. Let’s dig in!
Are you building a startup and plan on selling to enterprise? We have an open source (contributions welcomed) SaaS starter kit you are welcome to use to bootstrap your product.
We wrote a comprehensive post for the BoxyHQ blog covering a wide variety of stats, some coverage of the dark side, but also the happy path, authentication, minimum viable security and a lot more.
The cost of a data breach has reached another record with the average cost per incident now a staggering $4.45M (million dollars per incident) - IBM Report: Half of Breached Organizations Unwilling to Increase Security Spend Despite Soaring Breach Costs
"Cybercriminals launched approximately 7.9 million Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the first half of 2023, representing a 31% year-over-year increase.” - NETSCOUT Identified Nearly 7.9 Million DDoS Attacks in 1H2023 According to Its Latest DDoS Threat Intelligence Report
With the news that IBM demonstrated useful Quantum computing with the 133-qubit Heron Quantum Processing Unit (QPU), it is encouraging to read that in 2023 1.7% of TLS 1.3 traffic served by Cloudflare used post-Quantum encryption.
Read the full post over on our blog.
Our top 5 blog posts of 2023
5 - Enterprise Readiness Made Simple
Dive into this post to understand how BoxyHQ helps you prepare your app for enterprise clients and why we started BoxyHQ.
Coding today is like assembling lego blocks thanks to these APIs and developers love it. There is no need to re-invent these blocks in every startup, it’s much better to outsource the non-core stuff.
4 - Understanding System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) and Directory Sync
Unravel the complexities of SCIM and Directory Sync in our insightful blog post. Discover how these technologies streamline user management and enhance security in SaaS environments. A must-read for developers and IT professionals.
Smaller organizations might address these procedures manually, but the process can become error-prone and time-consuming when done at scale. This is where the SCIM and Directory Sync come to the organization's rescue.
3 - SSO Building Blocks - SAML, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect
Explore the foundational elements of Single Sign-On (SSO) in our 'SSO Building Blocks' blog. We delve into key protocols like SAML, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect, and how BoxyHQ’s SAML Jackson simplifies all of this.
So in a nutshell, Jackson acts as a proxy between the client app and the IdP doing the heavy lifting of orchestrating SAML/OIDC flows with the configured IdPs. This way you can quickly scale your app auth to any number of providers allowing you to focus on your core product.
2 - How to Add SAML Single Sign-On to an Express App
Learn to integrate SAML SSO into your Node.js Express app with our step-by-step guide. This post details setting up SAML Jackson and Auth0, configuring a PostgreSQL database on Heroku, and securing routes for authenticated users only. A practical resource for enhancing your app's security with SAML Single Sign-On.
You can also access the full code at the GitHub repository.
1 - Enterprise-ready SaaS Starter Kit
Discover how the 'Enterprise-ready SaaS Starter Kit' simplifies building SaaS applications. This comprehensive guide introduces a Next.js-based kit, featuring key components like SAML SSO, Directory Sync, Audit Logs, and more, streamlining the development process for enterprise-grade apps. This is a deep dive into all the pieces that make up the SaaS Starter Kit including a video walkthrough.
Interesting News From Around The Web
OSI work in developing an Open Source AI definition featured in the State of the Digital Public Goods Ecosystem 2023 report
2023, year of open LLMs - HuggingFace
BoxyHQ’s Interesting Factoid of the Month - Single Sign-On
An interesting fact about Single Sign-On (SSO) is its role in enhancing both security and user experience. While SSO is often praised for its convenience, allowing users to access multiple applications with a single set of credentials, it also significantly bolsters security. This might seem counterintuitive at first, as using one set of credentials for multiple services appears risky. However, SSO reduces the number of attack surfaces - instead of multiple passwords that could be potentially weak or reused, there's only one set of credentials to protect.
Furthermore, SSO often integrates with more advanced and secure authentication methods, like multi-factor authentication (MFA), which provides an additional layer of security. This integration ensures that even if the SSO credentials are compromised, unauthorized access can still be prevented. Additionally, SSO reduces the cognitive load on users from having to remember multiple passwords, which often leads to the creation of stronger, unique passwords and reduces the likelihood of password fatigue.