Security Checklist for AI-Built Apps: Auth, RBAC, Payments
AI-assisted coding accelerates delivery, but speed without guardrails invites risk. Whether you're shipping a quiz app builder AI, an internal dashboard, or a database builder with relationships, adopt this opinionated checklist before production.
Identity and Authentication
- Standardize on OAuth2/OIDC; avoid homegrown auth. Enforce MFA and phishing-resistant factors (WebAuthn, passkeys) for admins.
- Harden sessions: short-lived access tokens, rotating refresh tokens, device binding, and strict SameSite, Secure cookies.
- Add brute-force detection, WebAuthn attestation checks, and geo-velocity alerts for privileged accounts.
- For B2B, support SAML or SCIM for lifecycle management; automatically revoke access on HR events.
Authorization and RBAC/ABAC
- Model roles early. Principle of least privilege by default; deny-by-default service APIs.
- Externalize policy using policy-as-code (e.g., OPA) and version control reviews alongside app code.
- Enforce tenant isolation: include tenant_id in every query and cache key; test with chaos tenants.
- Leverage your database builder with relationships to implement row-level security and ownership constraints.
- Log every authorization decision with subject, action, resource, and outcome to support audits.
Data and Schema Safety
- Classify data. Encrypt sensitive fields client side when feasible; rotate keys using KMS with HSM-backed roots.
- Gate schema migrations behind approvals; block destructive changes without backups and rollback plans.
- Protect secrets: short TTL, automatic rotation, and sealed service accounts; forbid secrets in prompts or logs.
- Validate AI-generated queries with allowlists and cost limits; cap query fan-out across relationships.
Payments and Money Flows
- Minimize PCI scope: tokenize cards; never store PAN, CVC, or full ZIP; restrict access by role.
- Verify payment webhooks with signatures and replay windows; use idempotency keys to prevent double charges.
- Map payment states carefully: pending, succeeded, failed, refunded; log transitions for reconciliation.
- Protect marketplace payouts with KYC and per-tenant limits; require two-person review for manual adjustments.
AI-Specific Controls
- Mitigate prompt injection: instruction hardening, input segmentation, and output validation.
- Constrain tools: require signed function calls, explicit scopes, and human-in-the-loop for sensitive actions.
- Sandbox AI-assisted coding outputs: dependency pinning, SCA, SAST, and continuous SBOM diffing.
Observability and Response
- Centralize audit logs, structured and immutable; attach user, tenant, request, and model identifiers.
- Baseline behavior with anomaly detection; alert on auth failures, policy denials, and payment drift.
- Practice incident runbooks quarterly; predefine kill-switches to disable flows without downtime.
Release, Testing, and Access Boundaries
- Separate environments and keys; forbid cross-talk. Staging uses fake payment gateways and anonymized data with irreversible masking.
- Adopt change windows and approvals for auth, policy, and billing code; enable feature flags with per-tenant rollout and instant rollback.
- Continuously fuzz auth endpoints and payment webhooks; include red-team scenarios for role escalation and invoice fraud.
- Vendor review: DPA, SOC 2, breach SLAs, and residency for model providers and processors.
Start small: secure admin paths first, lock down payments, then expand RBAC and data controls. Treat your quiz app builder AI like a bank app, and you'll ship faster, with confidence.
