Introduction

The web has become an integral part of our lives, and web applications play a crucial role in today’s digital landscape. However, they are also a favorite target for cybercriminals. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) regularly releases a list of the top 10 most critical web application security risks to help organizations better secure their online platforms.

A1: Injection

Injection flaws, such as SQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing unauthorized data.

A2: Broken Authentication

Application functions related to authentication and session management are often not implemented correctly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities.

A3: Sensitive Data Exposure

Many web applications do not properly protect sensitive data, such as credit cards, tax IDs, and authentication credentials. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes.

A4: XML External Entities (XXE)

Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks.

A5: Broken Access Control

Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as accessing other users’ accounts, viewing sensitive files, modifying other users’ data, changing access rights, etc.

A6: Security Misconfigurations

Security misconfigurations can happen at any level of an application stack, including the platform, web server, application server, database, and framework. These misconfigurations can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data or functionality, or even full system takeover.

A7: Cross-Site Scripting XSS

XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites.

A8: Insecure Deserialization

Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks.

A9: Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities

Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover.

A10: Insufficient Logging & Monitoring

Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems to tamper with, extract, or destroy data.

Conclusion

The OWASP Top 10 provides a practical starting point to assess the security posture of web applications. By understanding and addressing these risks, organizations can significantly enhance their web application security.