OWASP Top 10 — Web Application Security Risks
- 1. INJECTION Allowing hostile data to be sent as part of a command or query ...
- 2. BROKEN AUTHENTICATION Incorrectly implemented authentication and session management functions. ...
- 3. SENSITIVE DATA EXPOSURE Many web technologies weren’t designed to handle financial or personal data transfers ...
- 4. XML EXTERNAL ENTITIES ...
- 5. BROKEN ACCESS CONTROL ...
- 6. Security misconfiguration ...
- 7. Cross site scripting ...
- 8. Insecure Deserialization ...
- Broken access control. ...
- Cryptographic failures. ...
- Injections. ...
- Insecure design. ...
- Security misconfigurations. ...
- Vulnerable and outdated components. ...
- Identification and authentication failures. ...
- Software and data integrity failures.
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How many instances of a vulnerability can a human test?
When humans test an application and see something like Cross-Site Scripting, they will typically find three or four instances and stop. They can determine a systemic finding and write it up with a recommendation to fix on an application-wide scale. There is no need (or time) to find every instance.
Why do we only pick eight of ten categories from the data?
Therefore, we only pick eight of ten categories from the data because it's incomplete. The other two categories are from the Top 10 community survey. It allows the practitioners on the front lines to vote for what they see as the highest risks that might not be in the data (and may never be expressed in data).
What is weighted exploit?
Weighted Exploit: The Exploit sub-score from CVSSv2 and CVSSv3 scores assigned to CVEs mapped to CWEs, normalized, and placed on a 10pt scale.
How many categories are there in the symptom classification?
There are three new categories, four categories with naming and scoping changes, and some consolidation in the Top 10 for 2021. We've changed names when necessary to focus on the root cause over the symptom.
What is the incidence rate of A03:2021?
94% of the applications were tested for some form of injection with a max incidence rate of 19%, an average incidence rate of 3.37%, and the 33 CWEs mapped into this category have the second most occurrences in applications with 274k occurrences. Cross-site Scripting is now part of this category in this edition.
What are the other Non-OWASP vulnerabilities?
OWASP states very clearly in their methodology that the Top 10 list is, by definition, only a subset of important security issues and organizations should be aware of additional security risks.
What is OWASP?
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a non-profit global community that strives to promote application security across the web. A core OWASP principle is that their knowledge base is freely and easily accessible on their website. With its tens of thousands of members and hundreds of chapters, OWASP is considered highly credible, and developers have come to count on it for essential web application security guidance.
How many cloud breaches are human errors?
Gartner estimates that up to 95% of cloud breaches are the result of human errors. Security setting misconfigurations are one of the prime drivers of that statistic, with OWASP noting that, of the top ten, this vulnerability is the most common. There are many types of misconfiguration that expose the company to cybersecurity risk, including:
What is an injection vulnerability?
Injection vulnerabilities can occur when a query or command is used to insert untrusted data into the interpreter via SQL, OS, NoSQL, or LDAP injection. The hostile data injected through this attack vector tricks the interpreter to make the application do something it was not designed for, such as generating unintended commands or accessing data without proper authentication.
What is cloud native application?
Cloud-native applications, with their distributed architectures that comprise many third-party libraries and services, are an attractive target for hackers. The fact that 82% of all vulnerabilities are found in application code is not lost on attackers, who seek to use this vector to compromise the networks on which the application is deployed.
Why is it important to understand code security vulnerabilities?
Every application developer, regardless of experience level, must make the effort to understand code security vulnerabilities in order to avoid frustrating and often costly application security failures.
Why do we need extra protection for data?
Data in transit and at rest — such as passwords, credit card numbers, health records, personal information, and business secrets — require extra protection due to the potential for cryptographic failures (sensitive data exposures). This is especially true if the data falls under any of the privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, and others. Is any data is sent in plain text? Are there any outdated or insecure cryptographic algorithms or protocols in use by default or in older code? Is it possible that default crypto keys are being utilized, that weak crypto keys are being generated and re-used, or that proper key management and rotation are being overlooked? Is it possible to check crypto keys into source code repositories? Is encryption not enforced, and is the received data encrypted?
What is Web Application Security?
Web Application Security includes the methods and techniques used to make any form of Web Application on a network, Secure and Safe from intentional and unintentional damages.
What is a security weakness?
Security Weakness: It refers to the various vulnerabilities or weaknesses in a program code, which enable malicious users to access restricted information. These can be in the form of –
What is whitelisting in SQL?
Input validation: Whitelisting is an approach to mitigate the risk of SQL injection. Whitelist validation tests an external input against a set of known, approved inputs. With whitelist input validation, the application knows exactly what’s desired and rejects other input values that fail a test against the known, approved input.
What is the OWASP Top 10?
The OWASP Top 10 is a list of the 10 most common web application security risks. By writing code and performing robust testing with these risks in mind, developers can create secure applications that keep their users’ confidential data safe from attackers.
What Is OWASP?
OWASP, or the Open Web Application Security Project, is a nonprofit organization focused on software security. Their projects include a number of open-source software development programs and toolkits, local chapters and conferences, among other things. One of their projects is the maintenance of the OWASP Top 10, a list of the top 10 security risks faced by web applications.
Why is testing for OWASP important?
Testing for OWASP vulnerabilities is a crucial part of secure application development. The sheer number of risks and potential fixes can seem overwhelming but are easy to manage if you follow a few simple steps:
Why is it important to identify vulnerabilities in third party code?
Identify known vulnerabilities in third-party code to ensure your program does not rely on insecure dependencies
What is application security testing?
Application security testing can reveal injection flaws and suggest remediation techniques such as stripping special characters from user input or writing parameterized SQL queries.
How to prevent insufficient logging?
To prevent issues with insufficient logging and monitoring, make sure that all login failures, access control failures, and server-side input validation failures are logged with context so that you can identify suspicious activity. Penetration testing is a great way to find areas of your application with insufficient logging too. Establishing effective monitoring practices is also essential.
Is deserialization easy to exploit?
Although deserialization is difficult to exploit, penetration testing or the use of application security tools can reduce the risk further. Additionally, do not accept serialized objects from untrusted sources and do not use methods that only allow primitive data types.
What is Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)?
The Open Web Application Security Project or OWASP is a non-profit foundation, a global organization that is devoted to improving the Web Application Security. It is a community-led forum that includes the developers, engineers, and freelancers that provide resources and tools for Web application security. Web application security deals with the attack vectors on websites, web applications, Web services such as APIs. OWASP is dedicatedly providing unbiased, practical information about web security and which may prevent attackers from planting malware, stealing data, or completely taking over your systems or Web-servers.
What is the risk of a website having broken authentication?
This risk consists of the functions related to authentication and session management, which are implemented incorrectly, which allows attackers to use manual or autonomous methods to gain complete control over the system. The websites with broken authentication are standard on the web. It usually refers to the logic issues that occur on the applications or websites authentication mechanism where a malicious user uses brute-force the authentication to confirm as a valid user in a system
What is sensitive data exposure?
It is one of the most widespread vulnerabilities on the OWASP list. Sensitive data exposure exploits data such as login credentials, Credit card numbers, Social security numbers, Medical information, Personally identifiable information (PII), Other personal information. An organization needs to understand the importance of protecting users’ data and privacy. This should comply with their local privacy laws.
What is the OWASP top 10?
It is a non-profit organization that regularly publishes the OWASP Top 10, a listing of the major security flaws in web applications. For example, one of the lists published by them in the year 2016, looks something like this:
How many underlying principles of application security are there?
There are six underlying principles of application security, that are made use of while suggesting recommendations for the OWASP Top 10.
Why is XSS bad?
The major cause of XSS is invalid data. Invalid data could be coming in from the user, who has an intent of hacking the system, and that’s where injection happens. Invalid data could be sourced from a database, which could be presented at a later point in time, out of context. Invalid data could also be passed into the system through external services. A security flaw in such a service could be sourcing malicious data to your application.
How to avoid exposing security flaws?
One way to avoid exposing such a security flaw would be to validate userInputData before making it part of the SQL query. SQL does offer you a way to do that - parameterized queries.
What is broken authentication?
Broken authentication occurs when a user of your application takes the relevant information - possibly a user name and/or password from one website, and reuses it on other sites, including yours.
Why do you mark cookies as secure?
Mark all your cookies as secure, as this ensures they are sent only to trusted websites. Also, make it a point to have trusted certificates for your cookies.
Which version of HTTP uses TLS?
Make sure you use the version of HTTP that uses transport layer security (TLS), namely HTTPS.
What are the threats of OWASP?
The OWASP Top 10, a widely referenced document that lists the key threats to modern web applications, hasn’t changed much in the past few years. Broken access controls, cross-site scripting, insecure configuration, broken authentication — these are some of the risks we’ve been constantly warned about since 2003.
What is a vulnerability in a URL?
This vulnerability involves the passing of sensitive data to parameters in a URL. The process enables malicious actors to gather sensitive data such as password, database details, token and other critical information. Simply transferring the values over a secure connection does not fix this vulnerability.
What does it mean to store passwords in plaintext?
Storing passwords in plaintext means writing them a clear, readable format. Plaintext passwords are not encrypted and can be accessed by other humans. And if a hacker with unauthorized access to your device or account breaks into your database, they can gain access to everyone’s password. This means your colleagues who rely on the same password across websites are at risk of their sensitive data being stolen.
What's Changed in The Top 10 For 2021
Methodology
Why Not Just Pure Statistical Data?
Why Incidence Rate Instead of Frequency?
What Is Your Data Collection and Analysis Process?
Data Factors
- There are data factors that are listed for each of the Top 10Categories, here is what they mean: 1. CWEs Mapped: The number of CWEs mapped to a category by the Top 10team. 2. Incidence Rate: Incidence rate is the percentage of applicationsvulnerable to that CWE from the population tested by that org forthat year. 3. (Testing) Coverage: The percenta...
Category Relationships from 2017