OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls 2018

These databases can also provide ready made scripts and techniques for attacking a given vulnerability,
making it easy for vulnerable third party software dependencies to be exploited . A lack of input validation and sanitization can lead to injection exploits,
and this risk has been a constant feature of the OWASP Top Ten since the first version was published in 2003. These vulnerabilities occur when hostile data is directly used within the application
and can result in malicious data being used to subvert the application; see A03 Injection for further explanations. Integrating directly into development tools, workflows, and automation pipelines, Snyk makes it easy for teams to find, prioritize, and fix security vulnerabilities in code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code.

• For example, even though both an accountant and sales representative may occupy the same level in an organization’s hierarchy, both require access to different resources to perform their jobs.
• These databases can also provide ready made scripts and techniques for attacking a given vulnerability,
  making it easy for vulnerable third party software dependencies to be exploited .
• If a vulnerable dependency is identified by a malicious actor during the reconnaissance phase of an attack
  then there are databases available, such as Exploit Database, that will provide a description of the exploit.
• The objective of this cheat sheet is to assist developers in implementing authorization logic that is robust, appropriate to the app’s business context, maintainable, and scalable.

Failure to enforce least privileges in an application can jeopardize the confidentiality of sensitive resources. Mitigation strategies are applied primarily during the Architecture and Design phase (see CWE-272); however, the principle must be addressed throughout the SDLC. There are other OWASP Top 10s that are still being worked on as ‘incubator’ projects so this list may change.

OWASP Proactive Control 5 — validate all inputs

You need to protect data whether it is in transit (over the network) or at rest (in storage). Some of this has become easier over the years (namely using HTTPS and protecting data in transit). You may even be tempted to come up with your own solution instead of handling those sharp edges. In this post, I’ll help you approach some of those sharp edges and libraries with a little more confidence. Database injections are probably one of the best-known security vulnerabilities, and many injection vulnerabilities are reported every year. In this blog post, I’ll cover the basics of query parameterization and how to avoid using string concatenation when creating your database queries.

• The document was then shared globally so even anonymous suggestions could be considered.
• Supported by industry-leading application and security intelligence, Snyk puts security expertise in any developer’s toolkit.
• A hard-coded or default password is a single password, added to the source code, and deployed to wherever the application is executing.
• The accountant should likely not be granted access to a customer database and the sales representative should not be able to access payroll data.
• With the latest release of the top 10 proactive controls, OWASP is helping to move security closer to the beginning of the application development lifecycle.
• Software and data integrity failures relate to code and infrastructure
  that does not protect against integrity violations.
• The languages and frameworks that developers use to build web applications are often lacking critical core controls or are insecure by default in some way.

While the current OWASP Proactive Controls do not match up perfectly with the OWASP Top Ten for 2021, they do a fair job of advising on controls to add to your applications to mitigate the dangers the Top Ten describes. Logging is storing a protected audit trail that allows an operator to reconstruct the actions of any subject or object that performs an action or has an action performed against it. Monitoring is reviewing security events generated by a system to detect if an attack has occurred or is currently occurring. Also called authorization, this determines if a request by a user, program, or process should be granted or denied. Input validation ensures that only properly formatted data may enter a software system component.

suggestions for more secure apps

Refer to the Cheat Sheets for the several good practices that are needed for secure authorization. There are also third party suppliers of Identity and Access Management (IAM) that will provide this as a service,
consider the cost / benefit of using these (often commercial) suppliers. Note that there are various ‘OWASP Top Ten’ projects, for example the ‘OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications’,
so owasp proactive controls to avoid confusion the context should be noted when referring to these lists. Snyk interviewed 20+ security leaders who have successfully and unsuccessfully built security champions programs. Check out this playbook to learn how to run an effective developer-focused security champions program. Interested in reading more about SQL injection attacks and why it is a security risk?

One example of a failure involves using untrusted software in a build pipeline to generate a software release. Another example is insecure deserialization, where an application receives an object from another entity and does not properly validate that object, resulting in an attack being loosed upon the application that received the object. Cryptographic failures are breakdowns in the use of cryptography within an application, stemming from the use of broken or risky crypto algorithms, hard-coded (default) passwords, or insufficient entropy (randomness).

A07 Identification and Authentication Failures

There is no specific mapping from the Proactive Controls for Insecure Design. The Top Ten calls for more threat modeling, secure design patterns, and reference architectures. Threat modeling analyzes a system representation to mitigate security and privacy issues early in the life cycle. Secure design patterns and reference architectures provide a positive, secure pattern that developers can use to build new features.

In this blog post, I’ll discuss the importance of establishing the different components and modules you’ll need in your project and how to choose frameworks and libraries with secure defaults. Two great examples of secure defaults in most web frameworks are web views that encode output by default (providing XSS attack defenses) as well as built-in protection against Cross-Site Request Forgeries. So, I’ll also show you how to use invariant enforcement to make sure that there are no unjustified deviations from such defaults across the full scope of your projects. In this session, Jim walked us through the list of OWASP Top 10 proactive controls and how to incorporate them into our web applications.

Proactive Controls Index¶

This concept is not only relevant for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and the different HTML contexts, it also applies to any context where data and control planes are mixed. However, development managers, product owners, Q/A professionals, program managers, and anyone involved in building software can also benefit from this document. Broken Access Control was ranked as the most concerning web security vulnerability in OWASP’s 2021 Top 10 and asserted to have a “High” likelihood of exploit by MITRE’s CWE program. 10, Access Control was among the more common of OWASP’s Top 10 risks to be involved in exploits and security incidents despite being among the least prevalent of those examined. Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic, noted that database control requires developers to think not only about the security of their application but where that application stores its data.