Years ago, I remember being on a technical interview phone call for a senior developer position. What stood out was when the interviewer asked me about performing input validation. The question was in regards to if validation should be on the client or the server. My answer: The server.
What took me by surprise was when the response was that my answer was incorrect. In fact, I was told that Microsoft recommends performing validation on the client. This was inaccurate information, but I let it go and continued with the interview.
Recently, I have been having more conversations around input validation. In particular, the question of client or server side. While it is easy to state that validation should always be performed on the server, lets dig into this a little more to better understand your situation.
From a pure security perspective, input validation must be performed on the server. There is one simple reason for this: Any protections built using client-side techniques can be bypassed by using a simple web proxy. Using JavaScript to enforce that a field contains an email address can be easily bypassed by intercepting the request and changing it after the JavaScript has executed.
If you look at the threat model of your application, requests from the client to the server cross a trust boundary. Because of this trust boundary we know that the data needs to be validated again. Why? There is no way to know what happened to the data before it was received. We can assume the request was sent from a browser, used by a typical user. However, we don’t know if the data was manipulated after leaving the browser, or even sent from a browser at all.
That, however, is from a strict security standpoint. We must not forget that client-side validation serves a purpose as well. While client-side validation may not be trusted by the server, it tends to be more focused on immediate feedback to the user. Not only does this save a round trip, or many round trips, to the server, it cuts down on the processing the server needs to handle.
If we take an example of purely validating required fields on a form, we can immediately see the benefit of client-side validation. Even a small form, if not complete can create a lot of inefficiency if the user is constantly posting it without all the required fields. The ability to alert to this on the client makes it much quicker and cuts down on the number of invalid requests to the server.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the user can’t fill in all the required fields to pass the client-side validation, intercept the request, and then remove some of those fields. In this case, server-side validation would catch this. The goal, however, of client-side validation is to provide a reactive user interface that is fast.
Understanding how each validation location functions and what the real purpose is helps us identify when to use each. While server-side validation is always required, client-side validation can be a great addition to the application.
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