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Chapter 9. Security and Performance

In Chapter 8, you added two vital pieces to Claudia's web site: a simple page manager and a simple newsletter manager. In this chapter, you're going to tie up two loose ends: security and performance. You're going to do an audit of security issues, and in the process tighten up some issues on the administrative panels. In Chapter 3, you opted to protect against XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks, but that still doesn't cover everything. For example, you haven't addressed form validation. You're also going to do some basic performance benchmarking and then put caching in place.

Please note that in a real project, you'd probably undergo security and performance issues in a more immediate way, and, in fact, you have implemented various minimal safeguards as you've progressed. However, because this is a book, and because security is such an important topic, it's likely that readers might skip to this chapter, and thus the topic is presented here as a whole.