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How does input sanitization prevent security vulnerabilities?
Asked on Nov 18, 2025
Answer
Input sanitization is a crucial security practice in web development that involves cleaning and validating user input to prevent malicious data from being processed by your application. By ensuring that input data is safe and conforms to expected formats, you can protect against common vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and command injection.
Example Concept: Input sanitization involves removing or escaping potentially harmful characters from user input before processing it. This process ensures that special characters are not interpreted as code by the server or database, thereby preventing attacks such as SQL injection where an attacker might try to manipulate a database query by injecting SQL code. Similarly, for XSS, sanitization helps prevent the execution of malicious scripts in the user's browser by escaping HTML tags.
Additional Comment:
- Always validate input on both client-side and server-side for comprehensive security.
- Use libraries or frameworks that provide built-in sanitization functions to reduce the risk of errors.
- Regularly update your sanitization logic to address new vulnerabilities and attack vectors.
- Consider using parameterized queries or ORM tools to handle database interactions safely.
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