In this episode, we focus on making our Stripe webhook route much more secure. Up until now, anyone (and anything) could send requests to our webhook endpoint—definitely not ideal! First, we use Postman to show how the route can currently be hit without much restriction, even though without a proper payload it still errors out. But the main issue is that, theoretically, someone could trigger actions (like upgrading themselves!) by hitting this unprotected endpoint.
To fix this, we take advantage of Stripe's webhook signing secret. We go over to Stripe's dashboard, reveal that secret, and add it to our environment config. Instead of just handling the security check in the controller, we clean this up and put our verification logic in middleware for better separation of concerns.
With the Stripe SDK, we implement signature verification in our new middleware. If the signature doesn't match, we respond with a forbidden error, shutting down bad actors without leaking extra details. After setting this up, we test in Postman again—and now, unauthorized requests are blocked!
Finally, to make sure things haven't broken, we run through an actual payment in the app. The payment goes through, and Stripe's legitimate webhook is received and verified with the signing key—proving that real Stripe webhooks still work, while random requests are safely denied. This episode is all about locking down the webhook route so only Stripe can call it.