Step 7: Security Audit & OWASP Top 10 Mapping

This document provides a comprehensive security review of the Cooking Nexus platform, analyzing its defensive posture against the OWASP Top 10 (2021) web application vulnerabilities, IoT appliance threat models, and Generative AI prompt injection risks.

---

7.1 OWASP Top 10 Vulnerability Matrix

OWASP Vulnerability	Project Risk Assessment	Current Defense Implementation	Remaining Gap & Interview Attack Vector
A01: Broken Access Control	High	Client-side protected route guard in [ProtectedRoute.tsx](file:///Users/avishjain/avishjain9-repos/26-cooking-nexus/27-kitchen-companion-pro/src/components/ProtectedRoute.tsx).	Missing backend Bearer JWT verification middleware on /api/vision and /api/members/:id. Attackers can query profiles directly via cURL.
A02: Cryptographic Failures	Medium	JWT signed with HMAC-SHA256 (jsonwebtoken) with strict 15-minute expiration window ([authController.js:L8](file:///Users/avishjain/avishjain9-repos/26-cooking-nexus/controllers/authController.js#L8)).	JWT_SECRET in .env uses a development placeholder (supersecretkey123). In production, this must be a 256-bit cryptographically random key managed via AWS Secrets Manager.
A03: Injection (SQL / NoSQL)	High	Mongoose schema type coercion prevents direct string concatenation injection.	Express req.body in /api/vision is passed directly to visionService.analyze(req.body) without Zod schema stripping, leaving potential for MongoDB $where or operator injection.
A04: Insecure Design	Medium	Passwordless Magic Links eliminate credential database theft entirely.	Lack of hardware mutual TLS (mTLS) or device API keys on range hood camera endpoints. Any device on the local network can spoof smoke alarms.
A05: Security Misconfiguration	Medium	Standard Express 5 configuration.	Missing helmet security headers (HSTS, Content Security Policy, X-Frame-Options); Express X-Powered-By: Express header is currently exposed.
A06: Vulnerable & Outdated Components	Low	Modern dependencies: Express 5.2.1, Mongoose 8.23.0, React 18.3.1.	Regular npm audit scans must be scheduled in GitHub Actions CI/CD to detect zero-day vulnerabilities in indirect dependencies.
A07: Identification & Auth Failures	Medium	Expired tokens (>15m) are strictly rejected with HTTP 401 in [authController.js:L26](file:///Users/avishjain/avishjain9-repos/26-cooking-nexus/controllers/authController.js#L26).	No brute-force rate limiting on /api/auth/login. An attacker could spam thousands of email addresses to trigger denial of service on mailer queues.
A08: Software & Data Integrity Failures	Medium	Strict SSE parsing in ai-stream.ts decodes choices[0].delta.content.	Recipe Import mode evaluates LLM JSON output without a secondary cryptographic signature, exposing client state if the LLM is jailbroken.
A09: Security Logging & Monitoring Failures	Medium	Kitchen hazard events are recorded in SafetyLog collection with timestamps.	No audit trail for failed login attempts or unauthorized member profile queries; logs are output to console.log rather than a centralized SIEM like Datadog.
A10: Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)	High	Recipe import accepts URLs from users to scrape recipes.	If the backend fetches arbitrary user-submitted URLs, an attacker could supply http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ to harvest cloud infrastructure IAM credentials.

---

7.2 AI Security & Prompt Injection Defense

Prompt Injection Protections

1. System Prompt Primacy: The system prompt in [supabase/functions/chef-ai/index.ts](file:///Users/avishjain/avishjain9-repos/26-cooking-nexus/27-kitchen-companion-pro/supabase/functions/chef-ai/index.ts#L8-L31) is placed in the privileged { role: "system" } position, ensuring instructions take precedence over conversational user prompts.
2. Strict Output Parsing: In import mode, the prompt instructs the model to return ONLY valid JSON matching a predefined interface. Any conversational prose or malicious executable script tags injected by the source webpage are rejected by JSON.parse().

---

7.3 Data Privacy & Zero-Trust Architecture

1. Passwordless Security Architecture

• By utilizing 15-minute single-use signed JWT Magic Links, Cooking Nexus completely removes password storage from the database. A database dump contains only email addresses and preference timestamps, meaning there are no password hashes or rainbow table vectors for attackers to compromise.

2. Client-Side Session Storage vs httpOnly Cookies

• Currently, the frontend persists sessions in localStorage ([AuthContext.tsx:L40](file:///Users/avishjain/avishjain9-repos/26-cooking-nexus/27-kitchen-companion-pro/src/contexts/AuthContext.tsx#L40)).
• Attack Vector: In the event of a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability, malicious JavaScript could access localStorage.getItem("cookgrid_session").
• Production Hardening Plan: Migrate authentication token delivery to httpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Strict cookies, preventing client-side scripts from reading session tokens.

3. Camera Stream Privacy

• The overhead kitchen camera performs optical bounding-box classification at the edge on the local hardware. Only structured JSON hazard metadata ({ hazard: 'Smoke Detected', level: 'High' }) is transmitted over the wire to the backend, ensuring raw video footage of private home kitchens never touches cloud servers.