Essential Security Practices for Elixir and Phoenix Applications

The article provides a comprehensive checklist of eleven best practices for ensuring the security of web applications built with Elixir and the Phoenix framework. These recommendations stem from the author's experiences and aim to help developers avoid vulnerabilities that could lead to data breaches. Key practices include maintaining a detailed inventory of public-facing applications, running static analysis with Sobelow to catch vulnerabilities, checking for vulnerable dependencies using MixAudit, and ensuring that sensitive components such as databases are not exposed to the public internet. Further recommendations focus on implementing rate limiting on potentially exploitable endpoints, scanning codebases for secrets, and being cautious about using file processing libraries for user uploads. The author emphasizes the importance of proactive security measures within Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows, along with regular security assessments and audits.