As an alternative, you can choose to managed services and benefit from the cloud’s Serverless architecture of services like Auth0. Several tools can used to analyse dependencies and flag vulnerabilities, refer to the Cheat Sheets for these. The list has changed over time, with some threat types becoming more of a problem to web applications
and other threats becoming less of a risk as technologies change. When your application encounters such activity, your application should at the very least log the activity and mark it as a high severity issue.

The A05 Security Misconfiguration page contains
a common example of misconfiguration where default accounts and their passwords are still enabled and unchanged. These passwords and accounts are usually well-known and provide an easy way for malicious actors to compromise applications. The following “positive” access control design requirements should be considered at the initial stages of application development. A Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) is when an application is used as a proxy to access local or internal resources, bypassing the security controls that protect against external access.

OWASP Proactive Controls

Check out this playbook to learn how to run an effective developer-focused security champions program. The OWASP Developer Guide is a community effort and this page needs some content to be added. If you have suggestions then submit an issue and the project team can assign it to you,
or provide new content direct on GitHub. Test cases should be created to confirm the existence of the new functionality or disprove the existence of a previously insecure option. The session cookie value should never be predictable, and should comply with strong complexity for better security.

Stored XSS can be carried out in public forums to conduct mass user exploitation. In this vulnerable code, the ‘Statement’ class is used to create a SQL statement, and at the same time it is modified by directly adding user input to it, then it is executed to fetch results from the database. Performing a simple SQLi attack in the username field will manipulate the SQL query, and an authentication bypass can take place. A prominent OWASP project named Application Security Verification Standard—often referred to as OWASP ASVS for short—provides over two-hundred different requirements for building secure web application software.

Live Hack: Exploiting AI-Generated Code

In order to achieve secure software, developers must be supported and helped by the organization they author code for. As software developers author the code that makes up a web application, they need to embrace and practice a wide variety of secure coding techniques. All tiers of a web application, the user interface, the business logic, the controller, the database code and more – all need to be developed with security in mind. This can be a very difficult task and developers are often set up for failure. 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.

Access control should by default deny all requests which are from a user for a resource for which either access is restricted or an authorized entry has not been made. Many developers have a tough time handling authorization, and at some point leave a gap that gets exploited, leading to unauthorized data access. Authentication takes care of your identity, whereas authorization makes sure that you have the authority or privilege to access a resource like data or some sensitive information. As a general rule, only the minimum data required should be stored on the mobile device. But if you must store sensitive data on a mobile device, then sensitive data should be stored within each mobile operating systems specific data storage directory.

A09 Security Logging and Monitoring Failures

Access Control (or Authorization) is the process of granting or denying specific requests from a user, program, or process. Access control also involves the act of granting and revoking those privileges. This list was originally created by the current project leads with contributions from several volunteers. The document was then shared globally so even anonymous suggestions could be considered. The OWASP Top Ten Proactive Controls describes the most important controls and control categories that every architect and developer should absolutely, 100% include in every project.

Authentication and secure storage is not just limited to the username-password module of an application. Other key modules like forgot password and change password are also part of authentication. Financial data and personal information like SSN are some of the most important details a person is concerned with, so an application storing that data should make sure it is encrypted securely. Observe in the above code that the session cookie JSESSIONID remains the same for pre- and post-login. This vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker who has physical access to the machine and notes the value of session cookie pre-authentication. OWASP Access Control Cheat Sheet can prove to be good resource for implementing access control in an application.

Proactive Controls Index¶

It is also very rare when organizations provide developers with prescriptive requirements that guide them down the path of secure software. And even when they do, there may be security flaws inherent in owasp proactive controls the requirements and designs. When it comes to software, developers are often set up to lose the security game. This document is intended to provide initial awareness around building secure software.