How this open source document helps guide your security analysts
The Open Web Application Security Project, or OWASP, is an open-source project created by a non-profit organization dedicated to allowing organizations to web and software application security. The open-source model allows anyone to participate in and contribute to OWASP-related chats, projects and more. The material offered to organizations includes tools, videos, documentation, and forums, all free of charge and easily accessible through their website. One of their best-known projects is the ‘OWASP Top 10’.
In simple terms, the OWASP Top 10 lists the Top 10 security risks web applications face. The list is ranked in order of popularity, frequency of discovery, the severity of the uncovered vulnerabilities and magnitude of the impact of exploitation, to provide organizations, developers and web application security professionals guidance for remediations if provided for each risk, so that they can minimize the presence of known risks in their applications.
The comprehensive list was first published in 2003 and is updated every three to four years. The latest was published in 2021, so we can expect the next version in either 2024 or 2025. Though the list hasn’t been updated in a few years, each risk remains relevant. The guide below details the vulnerabilities in the most recent OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities with some potential mitigation methods.
Adding to the wealth of resources available for enhancing cybersecurity, Oppos Cybersecurity Compliance Consultants in Toronto stands out as a pivotal ally for businesses that navigate the complex landscape of cybersecurity threats and compliance requirements. With a team of seasoned experts who specialize in deciphering the intricacies of cybersecurity frameworks, including the critical insights provided by the OWASP Top 10, Oppos delivers bespoke solutions that fortify your digital defenses.
Why is OWASP Top Ten Project Important?
The OWASP Top 10, provides valuable insight and resources that present a standardized and prioritized approach to mitigating web application security risks. It is therefore recommended that you incorporate it into your development and security practices to enhance your resilience of web applications against cyber threats.
Firstly, the list helps raise awareness about the most detrimental and prevalent security risks you might face. By understanding these risks and how to tackle them, you can take proactive steps to mitigate them and prevent them—where possible—from occurring.
In addition, the list can be used to prioritize what vulnerabilities the organization should focus on addressing first, in order of criticality. This prioritization is valuable, especially when resources and time are limited.
Lastly, the list can act as a guide for developers and organizations to meet regulatory and compliance requirements as it has become an industry standard for web development.
Many standards and regulations, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and others, reference the OWASP Top 10, and thus, paying keen attention to the list during development can help web applications remain compliant.
We will now explore each vulnerability in the OWASP Top 10 to better understand them and how they can be avoided.
1. Broken Access Control
Broken access control is a type of vulnerability that allows unauthorized users to gain access to sensitive data or systems. This occurs when proper controls such as authentication and authorization are not properly implemented. For example, a website could allow users to edit the URL to change the account they are logged into, without proper verification.
Types of Broken Access Control Vulnerabilities
- Insecure Direct Object References: In this type of vulnerability, the hacker can manipulate the values in the URL, to expose direct references to an internal object, like a file or database record.
- Violation of the principle of Least Privilege: the principle of least privilege is an information security concept in that state, limiting users’ access rights to only what is strictly required to do their jobs. If violated, normal users will have access to admin features, and other resources and functions unnecessarily.
- Mass Assignment: This occurs when an application allows attackers to inject arbitrary data that is used to automatically populate an object. If the input is not properly sanitized, the data injected could be malicious code that will be executed when a user or entity accesses the object.
How to prevent it?
Practice Network Segmentation – the process of dividing a network into smaller subnets. Segmentation works by controlling how traffic flows among the parts of a network. This can help restrict access by reducing the attack surface and preventing unauthorized users from accessing sensitive data or systems.
Use Multi-Factor Authentication, a multi-layered defense strategy that combines different authentication mechanisms to validate a user‘s identity., helping to prevent unauthorized access. In implementation, two or more identification methods (such as tokens or biometric IDs) are presented before access is granted.
This method and regularly reviewing and monitoring logs for suspicious activity and patching applications, helps organizations protect themselves from bokeh access control attacks.
2. Injection
This is a web vulnerability that occurs when attackers send hostile data to an interpreter, as part of a command or query, causing that data to be complained and executed on the server. Common forms of injection include SQL, NoSQL and LDAP. This category now encompasses Cross Site Scripting (XSS) – inserting malicious code into input fields, so attackers can execute unauthorized commands, access sensitive databases, and potentially gain control over systems.
How can it be prevented?
Injection attacks can be prevented with input validation or sanitization before it is passed to the SQL query. Validation means rejecting suspicious-looking data, and sanitization refers to cleaning up the suspicious-looking parts of the data.
You should also configure proper error handling on web servers and code, so that the database error messages are not sent to the client web browser, as attackers can use the technical details in the error messages to edit their queries to increase their chances of a successful exploitation attack.
3. Security Logging and Monitoring Failures
Log files are computer-generated historical data files that serve as a primary data source for information related to transactions, activities, errors, operations, intrusions, and usage patterns of applications, servers, operating systems, or other devices. The exploitation of poor logging practices is a key factor in many major incidents.
Hackers rely on the lack of maintenance of logs and timely responses to achieve their goals without being detected. An example of poor logging hurting the system is if a cybercriminal were to scan your network attempting to use common passwords to log into users’ accounts, the false login attempt(s) would be presented in the scans. This would go undetected in a poorly monitored network, allowing them to continue to try to log in until successful, thus gaining access to your network or applications.
Proper logging and monitoring include:
- Log collection: Log collection is collecting log entries from various sources in an organization and bringing them all to a single place. It includes log enrichment such as parsing, converting, and filtering logs.
- Log management: Log management is continuously gathering, storing, processing, and analyzing data from disparate programs and applications to optimize system performance, identify technical issues, better manage resources, strengthen security and improve compliance.
- Log analysis: Log analysis is reviewing computer-generated event logs to proactively identify bugs, security threats, or other risks.
How can it be prevented?
We recommend implementing one or more of the following controls to prevent insufficient logging and monitoring.
- Ensure that logs are created in a format that logs management solutions can easily consume.
- Logs should be stored in an easily readable format.
- Ensure log data is encoded correctly to prevent injections or attacks on the logging or monitoring systems.
4. Sensitive Data Exposure
This refers to a critical web application failure that is responsible for the breach and exposure of private, sensitive, and critical data to unauthorized parties. Sensitive data refers to personal identifying information. If this becomes available to hackers, they could sell it for profit, hold it at ransom, fraud, or identity theft.
This data includes names, addresses, social security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and financial information. Similarly, sensitive business data includes trade secrets and business plans. This information can be easily stolen if information is handled (transported and stored) improperly.
For example, storing sensitive data in plain text documents makes our application vulnerable to this attack. Exposure can also occur when weak encryption or improper access control leads to data breaches and compromises user privacy and security.
How to Prevent this?
Minimize or remove unwanted data. By classifying data that is processed, stored, or transmitted, you can create rules to determine which data is needed and which isn’t. This will give them a clear picture of the data’s owners, locations, security, and governance measures enabled. We can also determine which data is sensitive according to compliance, regulations, laws, and business needs. Depending on the industry-specific guidelines, they provide easy-to-follow instructions.
Encrypt data in transit and at rest. Encrypting data in transit uses TSLand HTTPS. Transport Layer Security is a security protocol designed to facilitate privacy and data for communication online. It encrypts communication between web applications and servers.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is a web security mechanism that helps to protect websites against man-in-the-middle attacks such as protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking. Likewise, we recommend you encrypt all sensitive data stored by our application using strong and updated standard algorithms, protocols, and keys to protect it.
5. Cross-Site Scripting
This vulnerability occurs when insecure web applications allow users to add custom code to the URL path. These scripts can be executed within the context of a user’s browser, allowing the attacker to steal sensitive information, manipulate the page’s appearance, run malicious Javascript code on a victim’s computer, or perform other malicious actions on behalf of the victim.
In addition, if the victim user has privileged access within the application, then the attacker might be able to gain full control over all of the application’s functionality and data.
How to prevent this?
Mitigating cross-site scripting vulnerabilities involves a combination of measures.
Validate user-generated input, remove any input from HTML output, encode the output to prevent it from being interpreted as active content, and take a zero-trust approach.
Employ whitelisting and blacklisting validation. Both methods aim to control and sanitize user input but operate in distinct ways. Whitelisting involves specifying a set of allowed characters, patterns, or input formats deemed safe. Any input that does not conform to the whitelist is rejected.
By allowing only known safe input and rejecting everything else, whitelisting helps prevent malicious input from being executed. For example, if a web application expects only alphanumeric characters in a particular field, any input containing special characters or scripts would be rejected.
In contrast, blacklisting involves specifying a set of disallowed characters, patterns, or input formats. Any input that matches these blacklisted items is rejected. Blacklisting attempts to identify and block specific known malicious input patterns. For example, a blacklist might include common XSS attack vectors or scripts.
Use Content Security Policy (CSP) as a last line of defense, reducing the severity of any remaining XSS vulnerabilities. It works by whitelisting approved URLs and only allows JavaScript files loaded from a trusted, uncorrupted host.
6. Insecure Design
At its root, insecure design is the lack of proper security controls integrated into the web application during the development cycle. This leads to design and architectural flaws that hackers could exploit. As the web application does not consider security, this can lead to a wide range of deep-rooted security consequences. It is thus often recommended to have a “shift-left” mentality in the coding space to pre-code critical activities for the principles of Secure by Design.
At this stage, crucial designs about the application take place; thus, if vulnerabilities are identified here, we have to mitigate them before progressing in the development.
How to prevent this?
Avoiding these vulnerabilities requires a security mindset culture during web development. This can take many shapes, including following security best practices, performing regular code reviews and audits, establishing and using a library of secure design patterns or paved roads ready-to-use components, and using threat modeling for critical authentication, access control, business logic, and key flows.
There are many options for a secure development lifecycle, allowing organizations to find what best meets their needs. Using any reputable life cycle along with the previously stated steps will increase the overall built-in security of an application.
7. Server Side Request Forgery
Server Side Request Forgery is a web security vulnerability that allows an attacker to induce the server-side application to request an unintended resource or service, often on the same server or within an internal network. They do this by modifying the URL. the attacker might cause the server to connect to internal-only services within the organization’s infrastructure, leading to information disclosure, unauthorized access to internal resources, or attacks against other systems. The common targets in an SSRF attack include:
1. Web applications that permit users to supply URLs for importing data, like files, images, and documents.
2. Applications using vulnerable third-party libraries
3. Systems that lack proper input validation and sanitation allow attackers to manipulate URLs and perform unauthorized actions.
How can this be prevented?
One technique to prevent SSRF is whitelisting. Whitelisting is a security measure that allows only specific, known domains or IP addresses to be accessed by a server-side program.
Another preventative technique is restricting or disabling unused URL schemas. As most applications only make requests using HTTP or HTTPS, those are the only ones that should be allowed. You should therefore clock requests using file:///, dict://, ftp://, and gopher:// to prevent attacks that exploit these protocols.
Employ the use of cloud-built-in protection mechanisms. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and other cloud vendors enable SSRF mitigation by hardening their configuration.
8. Identification and Authentication Failures
Identification and authentication failures are security vulnerabilities that can occur when a system or application fails to identify, validate, or authenticate a user correctly. This can allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to systems and data. This validation could be performed with one or more methods, including passwords, one-time pins (via SMS or email), authenticator apps, or biometrics.
How can this be prevented?
The key to protecting against Identification and Authentication Failures is to instill best practices at both the user and application levels. To bolster the authentication process, you should implement strong multi-factor authentication (requiring users to provide multiple forms of evidence to verify their identity), to prevent automated credential stuffing, brute force, and other attacks.
Implement strong password policies requiring minimum length, complexity, and regular rotation – adhering to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-63b’s guidelines. This approach will reduce the risk of passwords being cracked or guessed.
Limit or delay failed login attempts, and be careful not to create a denial of service scenario. Log all failures and alert administrators when credential stuffing, brute force, or other attacks are detected.
9. Vulnerable and Outdated Components
Vulnerable and outdated components are when open-source or proprietary code contains software vulnerabilities or is no longer maintained or supported by the developers. Attackers can exploit these components to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data or take control of the system. Attackers can exploit outdated components to launch attacks, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc.
This vulnerability can also manifest if you do not regularly scan for vulnerabilities and subscribe to security bulletins related to the components you use, if software developers fail to test the compatibility of updated or patched libraries and If you do not fix or upgrade the underlying platform, frameworks, and dependencies in a risk-based, timely fashion.
How can this be prevented?
A baseline patch management process should be in place to remove unused dependencies, unnecessary features and components, files, and documentation, and manage inventory versioning for both the client and server-side components and their dependencies. If patching is not possible, consider deploying a virtual patch to monitor, detect, or protect against the discovered issue.
Use automated tools to regularly scan your web applications for vulnerabilities. Avoid using components that have not been updated in a long time or have no active development community. Keep an inventory of all third-party libraries or frameworks used in your web applications.
10. Software and Data Integrity Failures
Software and data integrity failures are vulnerabilities related to code and infrastructure that do not protect against integrity violations, thus allowing an attacker to modify or delete data in an unauthorized manner.
Some examples of software and data integrity failures can be seen when the software does not properly verify the data source before it is processed, fails to verify the integrity of the software it downloads, and deserializes data that has not been adequately verified. This can allow an attacker to inject malicious code into the system.
How can this be prevented?
A key component to preventing Software and Data Integrity Failures is regularly monitoring for updates and security patches for all components and applying them as soon as possible to help minimize risks.
Create a reliable and consistent process for updating and patching components, ensuring the application’s resilience and alignment with the latest security standards.
Consistently monitor and keep track of updates and security patches for all components, applying these updates as soon as possible to mitigate potential risks linked to vulnerabilities.
Replace unsupported or insecure components to guarantee the application uses up-to-date and secure components.
Use a Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool to identify and report any vulnerable components in the application automatically. This empowers your team to quickly address the identified issues, effectively minimizing potential risks.
Neglecting the verification process of software and data integrity is a significant risk to any organization. It could potentially grant malicious actors access to sensitive information, resources, and control over the network.
This is where we at Oppos can assist. We can identify and address vulnerabilities outlined in the OWASP Top 10. Oppos adopts a proactive strategy by simulating an attacker’s actions. Our penetration testing services process initiates with thorough information gathering and enumeration to pinpoint vulnerable parameters. Subsequently, our consultants systematically exploit these vulnerabilities to assess the application’s genuine security status.
Our main goal is to unveil potential risks, including unauthorized access to confidential information, control over applications or networks, and identification of security gaps. Following the testing phase, our consultants compile a comprehensive report containing identified vulnerabilities and detailed exploitation notes.
If you have concerns about being susceptible to such vulnerabilities, do not hesitate to contact us. Oppos can guide you through scanning for and addressing software and data integrity failures, ensuring the robustness of your security measures.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, the OWASP Top 10 provides a comprehensive framework for developers, designers, architects, and business owners to understand common vulnerabilities and security risks in web applications. The open-source project offers many resources, including tools, documentation, and forums, all freely accessible to enhance web and software application security.
Throughout this exploration, we addressed the current OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, such as Broken Access Control, Injection, Security Logging and Monitoring Failures, Sensitive Data Exposure, Cross-Site Scripting, Insecure Design, server-side request Forgery, Identification and Authentication Failures, Vulnerable and Outdated Components, and Software and Data Integrity Failures, while also shedding light on the intricacies of each threat and offers preventive measures.
Oppos, as a proactive cybersecurity partner, stands ready to assist organizations in identifying and addressing vulnerabilities outlined in the OWASP Top 10. Through a comprehensive and robust penetration testing process, we aim to uncover potential risks, provide detailed reports, and guide organizations in fortifying their security measures against unauthorized access, control breaches, and other security gaps.
As the digital landscape evolves, staying informed and adopting proactive security measures becomes paramount. We, therefore, urge organizations to leverage the insights and recommendations from the OWASP Top 10, along with the expertise of cybersecurity partners like Oppos, to fortify their defenses against emerging threats and ensure the integrity and security of their web applications.
