OWASP Developer Guide Top 10 Proactive Controls OWASP Foundation

Those same vetted security requirements provide solutions for security issues that have occurred in the past. It’s important to carefully design how your users are going to prove their identity and how you’re going to handle user passwords and tokens. This should include processes and assumptions around resetting or restoring access for lost passwords, tokens, etc. In this post, you’ll learn how using standard and trusted libraries with secure defaults will greatly help you implement secure authentication. As developers prepare to write more secure code, though, they’re finding that few tools are designed with software writers in mind. For example, the OWASP Top 10, a cornerstone of web application security, identifies the risks of the most common vulnerabilities in applications.

Discover tips, technical guides, and best practices in our monthly newsletter for developers. Always treat data as untrusted, since it can originate from different sources which you may not always have insights into. Recently, I was thinking back at a great opening session of DevSecCon community we had last year, featuring no other than Jim Manico.

Implement digital identity

Turn on security settings of database management systems if those aren’t on by default. A security requirement is a statement of needed security functionality that ensures one of many different security properties of software is being satisfied. Security requirements define new features or additions to existing features to solve a specific security problem or eliminate a potential vulnerability. In this series, I’m going to introduce the OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls one at a time to present concepts that will make your code more resilient and enable your code to defend itself against would-be attackers. When possible, I’ll also show you how to create CodeQL queries to help you ensure that you’re correctly applying these concepts and enforcing the application of these proactive controls throughout your code.

Instead of having a customized approach for every application, standard security requirements may allow developers to reuse the same for other applications. Unlike traditional one-off penetration tests, pen testing as a service (PTaaS) offers continuous testing of web applications to identify vulnerabilities before malicious owasp top 10 proactive controls actors can exploit them. Outpost24’s PTaaS platform combines the depth and precision of manual penetration testing with vulnerability scanning to secure web applications at scale. Injection flaws in web applications allow attackers to craft malicious inputs that can trick an app into executing unintended commands.

Checklist and Proactive Controls

The controls, introduced in 2014, have filled a gap for practitioners preaching the gospel of security to developers. Michael Leung, a management consultant with Canadian Cybersecurity Inc., used to manage security training for developers at a large financial institution in Canada. Ken Prole, chief technology officer for Code Dx, said the new recommendations speak the language of developers and make it easy to understand what they should be worrying about when creating secure applications. As vulnerabilities are discovered in them, you need to ensure continuous updates are applied to them to reduce exposure. Strong authentication can prevent vulnerabilities such as broken authentication and session management, and poor authentication and authorization. Although there’s a movement to eliminate passwords, they remain, and probably will remain, an important component of authentication.

It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications. The items on the top 10 provide actionable guidance on how to deal with important security risks. One of the main goals of this document is to provide concrete practical guidance that helps developers build secure software. These techniques should be applied proactively at the early stages of software development to ensure maximum effectiveness. It lists security requirements such as authentication protocols, session management, and cryptographic security standards.

Encode and Escape Data

Security requirements provide needed functionality that software needs to be satisfied. It is derived from industry standards, applicable laws, and a history of past vulnerabilities. The OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls 2019 contains a list of security techniques that every developer should consider for every software project development. Over the years, the OWASP Top 10 has undergone periodic revisions to stay relevant to the evolving threat landscape. Its data-driven approach, combined with expert insights, makes it a benchmark for understanding, testing, and improving web application security. Let’s explore each of the OWASP Top Ten, discussing how the pieces of the Proactive Controls mitigate the defined application security risk.

According to OWASP, a security requirement is a statement of needed functionality that satisfies many different security properties of software. Requirements can be drawn from industry standards, applicable laws, and a history of past vulnerabilities. A good place to start a search for requirements is the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS), a catalog of security requirements and verification criteria. OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls contains security techniques that should be included in every software development project. What’s more, each item is mapped back to the OWASP Top 10 risk it addresses.