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. Most businesses use a multitude of application security tools to help check off OWASP compliance requirements.

• Leveraging security frameworks helps developers to accomplish security goals more efficiently and accurately.
• Let’s explore each of the OWASP Top Ten, discussing how the pieces of the Proactive Controls mitigate the defined application security risk.
• 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.

Therefore, it is a good idea to use your best technical talent in your identity system. A new category this year, a server-side request forgery (SSRF) can happen when a web application fetches a remote resource without validating the user-supplied URL. This allows an attacker to make the application send a crafted request to an unexpected destination, even when the system is protected by a firewall, VPN, or additional network access control list. The severity and incidence of SSRF attacks are increasing due to cloud services and the increased complexity of architectures. An easy way to secure applications would be to not accept inputs from users or other external sources. Checking and constraining those inputs against the expectations for those inputs will greatly reduce the potential for vulnerabilities in your application.

C7: Enforce Access Controls

Error handling allows the application to correspond with the different error states in various ways. Incident logs are essential to forensic analysis and incident response investigations, but they’re also a useful way to identify bugs and potential abuse patterns. First, security vulnerabilities continue to evolve and a top 10 list simply can’t owasp proactive controls offer a comprehensive understanding of all the problems that can affect your software. Entirely new vulnerability categories such as XS Leaks will probably never make it to these lists, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them. For this reason, you must protect the data requirements in all places where they are handled and stored.

While this is a good application security practice, it is not sufficient—organizations still face the challenge of aggregating, correlating, and normalizing the different findings from their various AST tools. This is where an application security posture management (ASPM) solution will improve process efficiency and team productivity. This is a new category for 2021 that focuses on software updates, critical data, and CI/CD pipelines used without verifying integrity. Also now included in this entry, insecure deserialization is a deserialization flaw that allows an attacker to remotely execute code in the system.

OWASP Top 10 2021

In this post, I’ll help you approach some of those sharp edges and libraries with a little more confidence. No matter how many layers of validation data goes through, it should always be escaped/encoded for the right context. 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. The digital identity is a unique representation of a person, it determines whether you can trust this person or who and what he claims.

• In this special presentation for PHPNW, based on v2.0 released this year, you will learn how to incorporate security into your software projects.
• The OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS), catalog of security requirements and audit criteria, is a good starting point for finding criteria.
• The former external entities category is now part of this risk category, which moves up from the number 6 spot.
• Checking and constraining those inputs against the expectations for those inputs will greatly reduce the potential for vulnerabilities in your application.
• They are ordered by order of importance, with control number 1 being the most important.
• Exception handling can be important in intrusion detection because sometimes attempting to compromise an application can trigger an error that raises a red flag indicating that the application is being attacked.

This document is written for developers to assist those new to secure development. Access control, also known as authorization, is to grant or deny requests from users, programs, or processes. When designing access controls, do it in advance and force all requests to go through an access control check. By default, deny access control and restrict access to what is required to complete the task.

A06 Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Components with known vulnerabilities, such as CVEs, should be identified and patched, whereas stale or malicious components should be evaluated for viability and the risk they may introduce. Previously number 5 on the list, broken access control—a weakness that allows an attacker to gain access to user accounts—moved to number 1 for 2021. The attacker in this context can function as a user or as an administrator in the system. Defining your security requirements is the most important proactive control you can implement for your project. Third-party libraries or frameworks into your software from the trusted sources, that should be actively maintained and used by many applications. Leveraging security frameworks helps developers to accomplish security goals more efficiently and accurately.

Encoding and escaping plays a vital role in defensive techniques against injection attacks. The type of encoding depends upon the location where the data is displayed or stored. Instead of having a customized approach for every application, standard security requirements may allow developers to reuse the same for other applications. The OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls 2019 contains a list of security techniques that every developer should consider for every software project development. Stay tuned for the next blog posts in this series to learn more about these proactive controls in depth.

Implement OWASP Proactive Controls to Work

Once authentication is taken care of, authorization should be applied to make sure that authenticated users have the permissions to perform any actions they need but nothing beyond those actions is allowed. In this post, you’ll learn more about the different types of access control and the main pitfalls to avoid. Previously known as broken authentication, this entry has moved down from number 2 and now includes CWEs related to identification failures. Specifically, functions related to authentication and session management, when implemented incorrectly, allow attackers to compromise passwords, keywords, and sessions, which can lead to stolen user identity and more.