Security Checklist for AI-Generated Apps: Auth, RBAC, Payments
AI can scaffold features in minutes, but enterprises still ship risk. Use this concise checklist to production-harden anything your generators create-whether a portfolio website builder AI, internal CRM builder AI, or a public SaaS module.
1) Authentication and Sessions
- Mandate OIDC/OAuth2 with PKCE; disable implicit flows. Rotate refresh tokens every 24 hours and revoke on IP/UA drift.
- Use secure, HTTP-only, SameSite=strict cookies; block localStorage for tokens.
- Enable WebAuthn or passkeys for admins; require MFA step-up for payment actions.
2) Authorization and RBAC
- Implement policy-as-code (OPA, Cedar). Unit test "deny by default" with table-driven cases.
- Define resource scopes (account, workspace, object). Enforce ownership checks server-side, never in the client.
- Create break-glass roles with time-boxed elevation; log every policy decision.
3) Payments and Billing
- Never trust client amounts. Recalculate prices server-side from SKU and currency; verify webhooks with rotating secrets.
- Enforce idempotency keys on charge, refund, and subscription updates.
- Separate PII from payment metadata; tokenize card data with PCI-compliant providers.
4) Data Boundaries and Prompt Safety
- Constrain generation with allow-listed tools and schemas; validate JSON outputs with strict parsers.
- Redact secrets from prompts and logs; apply row-level encryption for customer projects and deals.
- Sanitize user-authored HTML; apply CSP with nonce, disallow inline eval.
5) Supply Chain
- Pin dependencies with checksums; enable provenance (SLSA). Scan SBOMs in CI.
- Require code-review gates for AI diffs; block on lint, type, and security tests.
6) Observability and Incident Readiness
- Centralize audit logs: auth events, policy decisions, payment outcomes, and admin actions.
- Auto-create runbooks from threat scenarios; test with game days covering data exfiltration and billing fraud.
7) Performance Without Sacrificing Safety
Do performance optimization for AI-generated code responsibly: cache RBAC decisions with short TTLs, pre-compile policies, and batch payment webhooks. Use circuit breakers on AI tool calls to isolate failures. Measure tail latency of security middleware; never bypass checks-optimize them.
Role-Specific Tips
- For a portfolio website builder AI: freeze templates behind server-side rendering, sign asset URLs, and gate publish actions behind MFA.
- For a CRM builder AI: enforce tenant isolation by workspace ID, mask leads in non-prod, and require step-up auth to export contacts.
Ship fast, but prove it's safe: automate these checks in CI, fail builds on violations, and review threat models every release.
8) API and Integration Boundaries
- Require HMAC signatures and nonce with strict clock skew; reject replays.
- Rate limit per tenant and per user; shard by key to avoid noisy neighbors.
- Normalize identifiers to UUIDv7; forbid sequential IDs that leak volume.
- For webhooks, accept only allow-listed IPs or mTLS; queue and retry with backoff.
Make security defaults the generator's template, not an afterthought; your AI delivers value only when trust scales with usage safely.
