What is OWASP and it’s top 10 vulnerabilities?

In this blog post, we will discuss the Top 10 vulnerabilities in OWASP Web applications. These applications are generally designed with security in mind. Maintaining application security is critical. Any loophole may lead to a attack by malicious entities, causing loss of critical information, deletion of data, and application failure.

What is OWASP?

OWASP stands for Open Web Application Security Project and is a non-profit organization that deals with the security of web applications. It is a repository of freely accessible materials that can be used to enhance the security of a web application. The materials included are videos, tools, documentation, and forums.

The Top 10 OWASP Vulnerabilities

OWASP 10 is a project of OWASP. It highlights the Top 10 vulnerabilities or security risks in a web application. To make a web application more secure, we have to cut these critical risks. Companies should emphasize minimizing these ten vulnerabilities as a good and recommended practice. This makes the web application more secure and trustworthy.

According to OWASP 10 following have been identified as the 10 web application security risks –

1. Broken Access Control

Access Control is a mechanism that regulates access to information and functions. It depends on the user’s role. It ensures that unauthorized agents are not allowed to access the resources. Broken Access Control may lead to the loss, stealing, deletion, or modification of sensitive data and information.

To prevent Broken Access Control, only allow access to public information. Deny access to any other kind of information by default. Applying rate-limiting techniques and disabling web-server directory listing are important factors. They can prevent Broken Access Control.

2. Cryptographic failures

We need to protect sensitive data from malicious agents. Sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and health records, needs protection. If it’s compromised, it may lead to loss of business and trust.

These are important ways to safeguard data. We need to work on using encryption algorithms. We also need to use secure transmission protocols and verify security mechanisms. This will help prevent cryptographic failures.

3. Injection

The interpreter encounters injection problems when it receives incorrect data as part of a command or query. An attacker can execute malicious queries and commands on the server. They can also access sensitive data. The most common types of injection attacks are cross-site scripting, SQL Injection, LDAP injection, OS Command Injection, CRLF Injection, ORM Injection, and EL Injection.

Validating and sanitizing the data can prevent such attacks.

4. Insecure Design

Security issues may result from insecure design. Insecure designs are the security weaknesses that can be introduced by design and logic.

The applications should be designed with their security in mind from the very beginning. If there is any change to the application, it should be properly tested to make sure that there is no failure in the flow. Threat modelling, unit testing, and integration testing are some ways in which we can ensure the security of the design.

5. Security Misconfiguration

The practice of security misconfiguration refers to using default settings that can be accessed by the attacker for easy access to sensitive data.

It can be prevented by not using the default accounts and passwords. Also, it can be improved by regular review and update of the security settings of the web server and web app and by making the software more robust with the correct security settings.

6. Vulnerable and Outdated Components

The code of the application may be secure, but if the third-party components, API, and other dependencies are vulnerable, it can lead to attackers taking over the webserver and making changes to the data. 

This can be prevented by removing all the unused dependencies and components, and by regular monitoring of the web app to discover vulnerabilities and find ways to mitigate them.

7. Identification of Authentication Failures

If the authentication and session management calls are not properly implemented, it may lead to high-security risks as the passwords or keys may be compromised by the attacker. 

This can be prevented by multi-factor authentication and by implementing a strong password policy.

8. Software Data Integrity Failures

Software Data Integrity Failures occur due to a lack of integrity verification in software updates, critical data, and continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines. Using this vulnerability the attacker can insert malicious code into the web app.

Digital signatures are a good way to verify data or software integrity. Tools like OWASP Dependency-Check can be used to verify that the dependencies do not contain any vulnerability.

9. Security Logging and Monitoring Failures

Security logging and monitoring failures can directly impact visibility, impact alerting, and forensics. They are critical in detecting and handling security incidents in a timely fashion.

Robust logging and monitoring systems should be used to respond to high-security incidents.

10. Server-side Request Forgery

At times the attacker sends malicious requests to the web server. These attacks can target the internal server and result in the exposure of sensitive information.

The client data should be validated, and all schemas of the application that are not necessary should be disabled.

Conclusion

Hence, from the above discussion, we can conclude that companies nowadays are resorting to a more proactive approach. They make all attempts to induce security in the code from the very beginning when developing an application. A list of vulnerabilities in OWASP that goes by the name OWASP 10 has to be addressed to enhance the security of software.

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