For application vulnerability, injection is one of the examples to be dealt with. An application is vulnerable to attack when: User-supplied data is not validated, filtered, or sanitized by the application. Dynamic queries or non-parameterized calls without context-aware escaping are used directly in the interpreter. Hostile data is used within object-relational mapping (ORM search parameters to extract additional, sensitive records. Hostile data is directly used or concatenated, such that the SQL or command contains both structure and hostile data in dynamic queries, commands, or stored procedures. Some of the more common injections are SQL, NoSQL, OS command, Object Relational Mapping (ORM), LDAP, and Expression Language (EL) or Object Graph Navigation Library (OGNL) injection. The concept is identical among all interpreters. Source code review is the best method of detecting if applications are vulnerable to injections, closely followed by thorough automated testing of all parameters, headers, URL, cookies, JSON, SOAP, and XML data inputs. Organizations can include static source (SAST) and dynamic application test (DAST) tools into the CI/CD pipeline to identify newly introduced injection flaws prior to production deployment.
The Open Source Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open-source application security community whose goal is to improve software security. Its industry-standard OWASP Top Ten Security Vulnerability List Guidelines list the most critical application security risks, helping developers better protect the applications they design and deploy. Find an overview and practical tips on the top ten vulnerabilities in the OWASP Top Ten Security Vulnerability List Developer Guide.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a non-profit organization and is not affiliated with any enterprise or consortium. Therefore, all facilities and documents provided and developed by OWASP are not affected by commercial factors.
Hi Zibai,
Good point. OWASP recommends that organizations establish an application security plan to gain insight and improve the security of their applications and APIs. Achieving strong application security requires many different parts of an organization to work together effectively, including security and auditing, software development, and business and execution management. Companies must focus on activities and outcomes that help improve enterprise security by eliminating or reducing risk.
OWAPS is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the security of Web applications. The OWAPS Top 10 are their best known projects. The OWAPS Top 10 focuses on the 10 most critical risks and is regularly updated. It is recommended that this document be used as an “awareness document” for organizations to mitigate security risks. This document includes attack scenarios and prevention methods related to the following 10 risks: Injection, Broken Authentication, Sensitive data exposure, XML External Entities (XXE), Broken Access control, Security misconfigurations, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Insecure Deserialization, Using Components with known vulnerabilities, Insufficient logging and monitoring.
Which do you think is the most dangerous to an organization? I think it is injection due to the simplicity and the fact that it is more widely known. This document is important though because it can provide assistance to firms on ways to avoid running into issues stemming from these attacks.
One of the OWASP application security I was like to talk about is injection. Injection attacks occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Attackers can use SQL Injection vulnerabilities to bypass application security measures and can often add, modify and delete records in the database causing loss of confidentiality, integrity and availability. There are several risks associated with injection attacks such as deleting system’s sensitive data, logging in as another user, taking control of the database server to execute commands. To prevent injection attacks OWASP recommends to use a safe API which avoids the use of the interpreter entirely or provides a parameterized interface.
Hello, Priyanka,
The Open Web Application Security Project, or OWASP, is an international non-profit organization dedicated to web application security. One of OWASP’s core principles is that all of their materials be freely available and easily accessible on their website, making it possible for anyone to improve their own web application security. I think that Injection attacks are most common and popular, in which untrusted data is sent to a code interpreter through a form input or some other data submission to a web application.
OWASP top 10 provides a guide for designers, educational developers, and administrators to identify the most common and important web application security vulnerabilities and how to prevent these high-risk problems. OWASP top 10 provides a detailed explanation of each risk problem, including how the problem occurs, whether the application is vulnerable, how to prevent, and some case scenarios.
For example, access control interrupts. OWASP top 10 suggests that attackers often use access control to attack the system. A lack of access control can be detected when access control cannot be verified. Attackers can use privileged functions or administrators to create, change or even delete recorded data, thereby affecting data security, availability, confidentiality, and integrity. Therefore, OWASP top 10 also provides some preventive measures, such as:
· except for public resources, it is rejected by default.
· model access control should enforce record ownership, rather than using the user’s rights to create, read, update, or delete any record.
· unique application business restriction requirements should be enforced by the domain model.
· record access control failures and alert administrators when appropriate (e.g., repeated failures).
These measures can maximize the security of system information and stop access control of illegal users.
Hi, Haozhe, thank you for sharing your point and I agree with your point. I ‘d like to add some to your point. The Top10 will updatd every 2-3 years in accordance with advancements and changes in the AppSec market.
The Open Web Application Security Project is an online community, and it provides some free resources for web application security. In the OWASP Top 10 – 2017, it outlining security concerns for web application security and 10 most critical risks. It included following 10 risk: Injection, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, XML external entities (attack against a web application that parses XML* input), broken access control, security misconfiguration, Cross-Site scripting (occurs when web applications allow users to add custom code into a url path or onto a website that will be seen by other users.), insecure deserialization (this threat targets the many web applications which frequently serialize and deserialize data), using components with known vulnerabilities, and insufficient logging and monitoring.
Hi Xinyi, I agree with your point of view. OWASP provides a source of reference on what are the top application security vulnerability, which helps developers and most users to avoid and how to protect themselves from it.
In today’s environment, web applications are very risky for organizations. Many attackers attempt to take advantage of web applications. The OWASP top ten helps organizations identify the top ten risks related to web applications. These risks could include Injection, Broken Authentication, Sensitive Data Exposure, XML External Entities (XXE),Broken Access Control, Security Misconfiguration, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Insecure Deserialization, Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities, Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Organizations will often have development sites, productions sites, and testing sites which have Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) strategies, where testing is integrated into the process. Typically you will need an application scanner, such as Tenable Web Application Scanner, in order to test these applications.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an organization in place to help improve application security on the internet. This specific article explains the top 10 web application risks that should be fixed when creating applications. This includes injection, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, XML external entities (XEE), broken access control, security misconfiguration, cross-site scripting (XSS), insecure deserialization, using components with known vulnerabilities, and insufficient logging and monitoring. From reading this top 10, I’m a bit worried about how organizations would be unaware about using components with known vulnerabilities. It is 9th on this list, but the fact that it’s that high is perplexing. Injection in the 1st spot is not a surprise to me as SQL injection is a very popular way of gaining access to an application. Hopefully the programmers of these web applications take precautions to secure the applications before deployment.
Hi Krish,
Good job on summarizing the report, I agree a lot of companies continue to use outdated resources because it’s too much work to replace/upgrade it. They’re just waiting for it to break and then dealing with the issues, but sometimes it’s too late and causes an unrecoverable loss. Developers should work hand in hand with the security team to ensure their code doesn’t have so many loopholes that can be exploited.
OWASP’s top 10 addresses the most impact security risk currently faced by organizations, the one that piques my interest the most is ‘Broken Authentication,
Broken authentication is when authentication and session management is implemented incorrectly, this allows attacks to compromise the login credentials, keys, or session tokens. Using this gateway, they can download other backdoors to exploit the users’ identities temporarily or even permanently. One way to determine if your application is vulnerable is if it allows automated attacks like “credential stuffing”. You can determine if your application is vulnerable to brute force or automated attacks if it uses insecure/weak passwords. If it uses ineffective recovery methods such as knowledge-based answers or has missing/ineffective MFA. It stores session ID in the URL and does not properly invalidate session IDs/tokens after inactivtiy. Passwords should never be saved in plain text or be weakly hashed. Having password checks, limit login attempts, invalidate inactive sessions and align password policies with the industry standards for minimum length, complexity, and rotation.
The one key point I want to talk about is what causes users to have broken authentication. Having the most strengthens password with multi-factor authentication can prevent the attackers to compromise and break the users’ system and data. As we can see many individuals would like to use a password combine with “123,” exactly “password,” or repeat the username. These are easy to remember for the users, but the attackers can break them easily. Also, we always emphasized the password should contain numerous, text, and special characters at least 8 characters. While making the authentication more secure, the users should set up multi-factor authentication to protect their accounts. For example, the user can use a code that receives on the phone or facial recognition to log in to the account. I think these improve the user-side authentication.
You listed some great points to protect from broken authentication. Implementing multi-factor authentication is an effective step to prevent against attacks. Login credentials should never be predictable as you mentioned the usage of 123 is extremely easy for the attacker to gain access to users system and data. Passwords should be complex and of specific length containing special characters, letters and numbers to prevent credential theft. Another effective way is to encrypt, hash, and salt the password which will help slow down brute force attacks.
An application security program plays an integral part in keeping an organization’s assets secure. The program should effectively track all the information assets and manage the security of the systems from breaches in confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In one of the organization’s I worked for has a system to manage all the assets/applications within the organization. It helps provide a central location to store all relevant information such as the asset owner, what groups need to be engaged if there is a disaster, list of servers, etc. Additionally, it helps track annual attestation if there has been any major changes to the system and when it is due for application scanning and penetration testing. Applications built from new projects must be added to the list and application testing is part of the SDLC lifecycle and must be complete before it is deployed to production.
The biggest takeaway here is from the injection section. The problem with injection is almost any source of data can be an injection vector, this makes it incredibly difficult to defend due to its versatility. Many times these attackers using injection will target injection flaws, that stem often from legacy code. While the flaws may be easy to discover, it is more so easy to see them when examining code. The consequences of a successful injection start with data loss and continue with corruption, amongst other things and the worst it could get is a complete host takeover. This would be detrimental to the organization as they would have to shut the entire system down to try to mitigate the issue.
Injection is certainly a prevailing issue in the world of cybersecurity. SQL injection methods often are the culprit for many attacks on web servers and systems.
OWASP top 10 Web Application Security Risk. The number one Web Application Vulnerability is Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. A successful attack may result in the unauthorized viewing of user lists, the deletion of entire tables and, in certain cases, the attacker gaining administrative rights to a database, all of which are highly detrimental to a business.
Hi, Kyuande. You have a great point on injection for application security. As the OWASP mentions, we can use a whitelist server-side combine with a safe API to avoid the use of an interpreter or migrate to use Object Relational Mapping Tools. I think we can also use LIMIT to restrict the number of records returned on the LIMIT value.
Hi Kyuande!
Great response! I confirm that SQL injection is one of the top risks that organizations face. When database access is being implemented, the user may be prompted for certain information, such as a username, password, or account pin code. This input is then tested with an SQL query. For instance, if you type your name, the string you type, $name, may be input into an SQL query to find your address. If input checking is not done, or poorly done, an attacker may be able to use SQL injection to enter a string that includes both the user’s name and more SQL query.
Application Security Refers to the security of the application level that aims to prevent data or code within the app from being stolen or hijacked. Some Application Security Attacks are SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, Which occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. A successful attack may result in the unauthorized viewing of user lists, the deletion of entire tables and, in certain cases, the attacker gaining administrative rights to a database, all of which are highly detrimental to a business.
The main focus of the OWASP Top 10 is to highlight the most critical web applications security risks. They use the OWASP Risk Rating Method which classifies and quantifies the exploitability , weakness prevalence/detectability and the technical and business impacts depending on the Threat Agent. The Top 10 list includes a variety of threats such as injection, broken auth, data exposure, external entities, broken access control, security misconfigs, cross-site scripting , insecure deserialization, components with known vulnerabilities and insufficient logging and monitoring. The document goes into detail on vulnerability , prevention, examples and references with which to gather more information on the type of threat. Finally the standard provides next steps to establish a secure environment for web apps and APIs using cheat sheets, Proactive controls Models and furthering knowledge through continuing education.
The OWASP Top 10 – 2017 is based primarily on 40+ data submissions from firms that specialize in application security and an industry survey that was completed by over 500 individuals. This data spans vulnerabilities gathered from hundreds of
organizations and over 100,000 real-world applications and APIs.
A primary aim of the OWASP Top 10 is to educate developers, designers, architects, managers, and organizations about the consequences of the most common and most important web application security weaknesses. The Top 10 provides basic techniques to protect against these high risk problem areas, and provides guidance on where to go from here
The OWASP Top 10 focuses on identifying the most serious web application
security risks for a broad array of organizations. For each of these risks, we
provide generic information about likelihood and technical impact using the
following simple rating scheme, which is based on OWASP risk rating methodology.
Hello Zhen, I want to add some to your comment. The Top10 is updated every 2-3 years in accordance with advancements and changes in the AppSec market. OWASP’s importance lies in the actionable information it provides; it serves as a key checklist and internal Web application development standard for many of the world’s largest organizations.
Attack surface analysis is the examination of a logical or physical infrastructure for security holes that could allow attackers to take advantage and compromise services. While this is a common practice among attackers, it’s also used by security personnel to discover possible attack vectors that could be used against their protected environment’s best interests. This is a very important process for security teams, and will help you understand how vulnerable an infrastructure really is—by observing it from an offensive point of view. Managing your infrastructure’s attack surface is of great importance. Another important but frequently overlooked subject is employee education. This is paramount for managing information in a healthy manner, and for staying alert toward possible anomalies. This rings especially true for people-facing roles like receptionist or call-center attendant, but even IT people such as help desks or DevOps teams should be on the loop of constant security best practices teaching.
Hi Junhan,
It is common for attackers to conduct good reconnaissance on your systems and map out the possible attack surfaces. Unfortunately, attackers use the same techniques used by security personnel to identify most vulnerabilities, and at times these vulnerabilities can be left unpatched even though they have been discovered by security teams. When effective patch management is not enforced, it is possible to increase the attack surface of any system as components become vulnerable.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open community dedicated to enabling organizations to develop, purchase, and maintain applications and APIs that can be trusted. In this document the OWASP does a great job of listing the top ten information security risks by rating them considering all the elements of the risks including attack vectors, security weaknesses and its impacts. OWASP includes vulnerabilities, preventions, and example attack scenarios.
The OWASP top 10 focuses on identifying the most serious web application security risks for a broad array of organizations. The top attack listed is an injection attempt. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. This issue with injection flaws is that they are easy to discover when examining code. Scanners and fuzzers can help attackers find injection flaws. Injection can result in data loss, corruption, or disclosure to unauthorized parties, loss of accountability, or denial of access. Injection can sometimes lead to complete host takeover. Source code review is the best method of detecting if applications are vulnerable to injections, closely followed by thorough automated testing of all parameters, headers, URL, cookies, JSON, SOAP, and XML data inputs. Another preventative measure is to use a safe API, which avoids the use of the interpreter entirely or provides a parameterized interface, or migrate to use Object Relational Mapping Tools (ORMs).
Hi Anthony,
It is vital for all use input to be validated and checked before any forwarding within or between applications. As the unwritten rule goes “never trust user input”, since it is common for attackers to try injection attacks. It is not easy isolating valid input from injection commands. However, all commands have a syntax, and can therefore filters can be put in place to ensure such content is filtered out before it reaches the intended target system or application.
The significance of using system components with known vulnerabilities stands out, due to the ample relations to real world breaches that took advantage of this vector. Organizations often fail to keep track or an inventory of their systems to help them schedule patching when due. This lax way of keeping up with security patches has from time to time been used to exploit some of the most prominent secure systems in use.
This goes along with ensuring that hardware components are upgraded as well since they are part of the system too. Using legacy equipment and systems expose the organization to known vulnerabilities that can be exploited at any time. It is up to the organization to implement a patch management team and ensure they stay on top of all possible loopholes and vulnerabilities to reduce the amount of exposure the system has, to attacks.
I agree that application hardening seems like a difficult task for an organization to manage and that true application hardening requires the hardware components are kept up to date as well. For hardware, it feels like this is best managed by using baseline scanning tools to detect out of date firmware or missing patches centrally within the organization.
I learned in this reading about OWASP has guidelines for developers, security testers, organizations and application managers that clearly outline what each of these roles can do to ensure the security of their applications. For example, application managers should ensure that security activities are part of the budget for the application as a standard. Organizations should determine protection needs for their application portfolio that are driven by privacy laws and regulatory environment. Security testers should use testing strategies using OWASP Security Knowledge Framework and OWASP Application Security Verification Standard. And developers should build applications and APIs using OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM) by tailoring software security for the specific risks facing the organization.
Ting-Yen Huang says
For application vulnerability, injection is one of the examples to be dealt with. An application is vulnerable to attack when: User-supplied data is not validated, filtered, or sanitized by the application. Dynamic queries or non-parameterized calls without context-aware escaping are used directly in the interpreter. Hostile data is used within object-relational mapping (ORM search parameters to extract additional, sensitive records. Hostile data is directly used or concatenated, such that the SQL or command contains both structure and hostile data in dynamic queries, commands, or stored procedures. Some of the more common injections are SQL, NoSQL, OS command, Object Relational Mapping (ORM), LDAP, and Expression Language (EL) or Object Graph Navigation Library (OGNL) injection. The concept is identical among all interpreters. Source code review is the best method of detecting if applications are vulnerable to injections, closely followed by thorough automated testing of all parameters, headers, URL, cookies, JSON, SOAP, and XML data inputs. Organizations can include static source (SAST) and dynamic application test (DAST) tools into the CI/CD pipeline to identify newly introduced injection flaws prior to production deployment.
Zibai Yang says
The Open Source Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open-source application security community whose goal is to improve software security. Its industry-standard OWASP Top Ten Security Vulnerability List Guidelines list the most critical application security risks, helping developers better protect the applications they design and deploy. Find an overview and practical tips on the top ten vulnerabilities in the OWASP Top Ten Security Vulnerability List Developer Guide.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a non-profit organization and is not affiliated with any enterprise or consortium. Therefore, all facilities and documents provided and developed by OWASP are not affected by commercial factors.
Wenyao Ma says
Hi Zibai,
Good point. OWASP recommends that organizations establish an application security plan to gain insight and improve the security of their applications and APIs. Achieving strong application security requires many different parts of an organization to work together effectively, including security and auditing, software development, and business and execution management. Companies must focus on activities and outcomes that help improve enterprise security by eliminating or reducing risk.
Wenyao Ma says
OWAPS is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the security of Web applications. The OWAPS Top 10 are their best known projects. The OWAPS Top 10 focuses on the 10 most critical risks and is regularly updated. It is recommended that this document be used as an “awareness document” for organizations to mitigate security risks. This document includes attack scenarios and prevention methods related to the following 10 risks: Injection, Broken Authentication, Sensitive data exposure, XML External Entities (XXE), Broken Access control, Security misconfigurations, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Insecure Deserialization, Using Components with known vulnerabilities, Insufficient logging and monitoring.
Austin Mecca says
Which do you think is the most dangerous to an organization? I think it is injection due to the simplicity and the fact that it is more widely known. This document is important though because it can provide assistance to firms on ways to avoid running into issues stemming from these attacks.
Priyanka Ranu says
One of the OWASP application security I was like to talk about is injection. Injection attacks occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Attackers can use SQL Injection vulnerabilities to bypass application security measures and can often add, modify and delete records in the database causing loss of confidentiality, integrity and availability. There are several risks associated with injection attacks such as deleting system’s sensitive data, logging in as another user, taking control of the database server to execute commands. To prevent injection attacks OWASP recommends to use a safe API which avoids the use of the interpreter entirely or provides a parameterized interface.
Haozhe Lin says
Hello, Priyanka,
The Open Web Application Security Project, or OWASP, is an international non-profit organization dedicated to web application security. One of OWASP’s core principles is that all of their materials be freely available and easily accessible on their website, making it possible for anyone to improve their own web application security. I think that Injection attacks are most common and popular, in which untrusted data is sent to a code interpreter through a form input or some other data submission to a web application.
Haozhe Lin says
OWASP top 10 provides a guide for designers, educational developers, and administrators to identify the most common and important web application security vulnerabilities and how to prevent these high-risk problems. OWASP top 10 provides a detailed explanation of each risk problem, including how the problem occurs, whether the application is vulnerable, how to prevent, and some case scenarios.
For example, access control interrupts. OWASP top 10 suggests that attackers often use access control to attack the system. A lack of access control can be detected when access control cannot be verified. Attackers can use privileged functions or administrators to create, change or even delete recorded data, thereby affecting data security, availability, confidentiality, and integrity. Therefore, OWASP top 10 also provides some preventive measures, such as:
· except for public resources, it is rejected by default.
· model access control should enforce record ownership, rather than using the user’s rights to create, read, update, or delete any record.
· unique application business restriction requirements should be enforced by the domain model.
· record access control failures and alert administrators when appropriate (e.g., repeated failures).
These measures can maximize the security of system information and stop access control of illegal users.
Zhen Li says
Hi, Haozhe, thank you for sharing your point and I agree with your point. I ‘d like to add some to your point. The Top10 will updatd every 2-3 years in accordance with advancements and changes in the AppSec market.
Xinyi Zheng says
The Open Web Application Security Project is an online community, and it provides some free resources for web application security. In the OWASP Top 10 – 2017, it outlining security concerns for web application security and 10 most critical risks. It included following 10 risk: Injection, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, XML external entities (attack against a web application that parses XML* input), broken access control, security misconfiguration, Cross-Site scripting (occurs when web applications allow users to add custom code into a url path or onto a website that will be seen by other users.), insecure deserialization (this threat targets the many web applications which frequently serialize and deserialize data), using components with known vulnerabilities, and insufficient logging and monitoring.
Ting-Yen Huang says
Hi Xinyi, I agree with your point of view. OWASP provides a source of reference on what are the top application security vulnerability, which helps developers and most users to avoid and how to protect themselves from it.
Jonathan Castelli says
In today’s environment, web applications are very risky for organizations. Many attackers attempt to take advantage of web applications. The OWASP top ten helps organizations identify the top ten risks related to web applications. These risks could include Injection, Broken Authentication, Sensitive Data Exposure, XML External Entities (XXE),Broken Access Control, Security Misconfiguration, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Insecure Deserialization, Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities, Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Organizations will often have development sites, productions sites, and testing sites which have Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) strategies, where testing is integrated into the process. Typically you will need an application scanner, such as Tenable Web Application Scanner, in order to test these applications.
Krish Damany says
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an organization in place to help improve application security on the internet. This specific article explains the top 10 web application risks that should be fixed when creating applications. This includes injection, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure, XML external entities (XEE), broken access control, security misconfiguration, cross-site scripting (XSS), insecure deserialization, using components with known vulnerabilities, and insufficient logging and monitoring. From reading this top 10, I’m a bit worried about how organizations would be unaware about using components with known vulnerabilities. It is 9th on this list, but the fact that it’s that high is perplexing. Injection in the 1st spot is not a surprise to me as SQL injection is a very popular way of gaining access to an application. Hopefully the programmers of these web applications take precautions to secure the applications before deployment.
Mei X Wang says
Hi Krish,
Good job on summarizing the report, I agree a lot of companies continue to use outdated resources because it’s too much work to replace/upgrade it. They’re just waiting for it to break and then dealing with the issues, but sometimes it’s too late and causes an unrecoverable loss. Developers should work hand in hand with the security team to ensure their code doesn’t have so many loopholes that can be exploited.
Mei X Wang says
OWASP’s top 10 addresses the most impact security risk currently faced by organizations, the one that piques my interest the most is ‘Broken Authentication,
Broken authentication is when authentication and session management is implemented incorrectly, this allows attacks to compromise the login credentials, keys, or session tokens. Using this gateway, they can download other backdoors to exploit the users’ identities temporarily or even permanently. One way to determine if your application is vulnerable is if it allows automated attacks like “credential stuffing”. You can determine if your application is vulnerable to brute force or automated attacks if it uses insecure/weak passwords. If it uses ineffective recovery methods such as knowledge-based answers or has missing/ineffective MFA. It stores session ID in the URL and does not properly invalidate session IDs/tokens after inactivtiy. Passwords should never be saved in plain text or be weakly hashed. Having password checks, limit login attempts, invalidate inactive sessions and align password policies with the industry standards for minimum length, complexity, and rotation.
Cami Chen says
The one key point I want to talk about is what causes users to have broken authentication. Having the most strengthens password with multi-factor authentication can prevent the attackers to compromise and break the users’ system and data. As we can see many individuals would like to use a password combine with “123,” exactly “password,” or repeat the username. These are easy to remember for the users, but the attackers can break them easily. Also, we always emphasized the password should contain numerous, text, and special characters at least 8 characters. While making the authentication more secure, the users should set up multi-factor authentication to protect their accounts. For example, the user can use a code that receives on the phone or facial recognition to log in to the account. I think these improve the user-side authentication.
Priyanka Ranu says
Hi Cami,
You listed some great points to protect from broken authentication. Implementing multi-factor authentication is an effective step to prevent against attacks. Login credentials should never be predictable as you mentioned the usage of 123 is extremely easy for the attacker to gain access to users system and data. Passwords should be complex and of specific length containing special characters, letters and numbers to prevent credential theft. Another effective way is to encrypt, hash, and salt the password which will help slow down brute force attacks.
Anthony Wong says
An application security program plays an integral part in keeping an organization’s assets secure. The program should effectively track all the information assets and manage the security of the systems from breaches in confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In one of the organization’s I worked for has a system to manage all the assets/applications within the organization. It helps provide a central location to store all relevant information such as the asset owner, what groups need to be engaged if there is a disaster, list of servers, etc. Additionally, it helps track annual attestation if there has been any major changes to the system and when it is due for application scanning and penetration testing. Applications built from new projects must be added to the list and application testing is part of the SDLC lifecycle and must be complete before it is deployed to production.
Austin Mecca says
The biggest takeaway here is from the injection section. The problem with injection is almost any source of data can be an injection vector, this makes it incredibly difficult to defend due to its versatility. Many times these attackers using injection will target injection flaws, that stem often from legacy code. While the flaws may be easy to discover, it is more so easy to see them when examining code. The consequences of a successful injection start with data loss and continue with corruption, amongst other things and the worst it could get is a complete host takeover. This would be detrimental to the organization as they would have to shut the entire system down to try to mitigate the issue.
Krish Damany says
Hi Austin,
Injection is certainly a prevailing issue in the world of cybersecurity. SQL injection methods often are the culprit for many attacks on web servers and systems.
Kyuande Johnson says
OWASP top 10 Web Application Security Risk. The number one Web Application Vulnerability is Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. A successful attack may result in the unauthorized viewing of user lists, the deletion of entire tables and, in certain cases, the attacker gaining administrative rights to a database, all of which are highly detrimental to a business.
Cami Chen says
Hi, Kyuande. You have a great point on injection for application security. As the OWASP mentions, we can use a whitelist server-side combine with a safe API to avoid the use of an interpreter or migrate to use Object Relational Mapping Tools. I think we can also use LIMIT to restrict the number of records returned on the LIMIT value.
Prince Patel says
Hi Kyuande!
Great response! I confirm that SQL injection is one of the top risks that organizations face. When database access is being implemented, the user may be prompted for certain information, such as a username, password, or account pin code. This input is then tested with an SQL query. For instance, if you type your name, the string you type, $name, may be input into an SQL query to find your address. If input checking is not done, or poorly done, an attacker may be able to use SQL injection to enter a string that includes both the user’s name and more SQL query.
Kyuande Johnson says
Application Security Refers to the security of the application level that aims to prevent data or code within the app from being stolen or hijacked. Some Application Security Attacks are SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, Which occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. A successful attack may result in the unauthorized viewing of user lists, the deletion of entire tables and, in certain cases, the attacker gaining administrative rights to a database, all of which are highly detrimental to a business.
Vanessa Marin says
The main focus of the OWASP Top 10 is to highlight the most critical web applications security risks. They use the OWASP Risk Rating Method which classifies and quantifies the exploitability , weakness prevalence/detectability and the technical and business impacts depending on the Threat Agent. The Top 10 list includes a variety of threats such as injection, broken auth, data exposure, external entities, broken access control, security misconfigs, cross-site scripting , insecure deserialization, components with known vulnerabilities and insufficient logging and monitoring. The document goes into detail on vulnerability , prevention, examples and references with which to gather more information on the type of threat. Finally the standard provides next steps to establish a secure environment for web apps and APIs using cheat sheets, Proactive controls Models and furthering knowledge through continuing education.
Zhen Li says
The OWASP Top 10 – 2017 is based primarily on 40+ data submissions from firms that specialize in application security and an industry survey that was completed by over 500 individuals. This data spans vulnerabilities gathered from hundreds of
organizations and over 100,000 real-world applications and APIs.
A primary aim of the OWASP Top 10 is to educate developers, designers, architects, managers, and organizations about the consequences of the most common and most important web application security weaknesses. The Top 10 provides basic techniques to protect against these high risk problem areas, and provides guidance on where to go from here
The OWASP Top 10 focuses on identifying the most serious web application
security risks for a broad array of organizations. For each of these risks, we
provide generic information about likelihood and technical impact using the
following simple rating scheme, which is based on OWASP risk rating methodology.
Xinyi Zheng says
Hello Zhen, I want to add some to your comment. The Top10 is updated every 2-3 years in accordance with advancements and changes in the AppSec market. OWASP’s importance lies in the actionable information it provides; it serves as a key checklist and internal Web application development standard for many of the world’s largest organizations.
Junhan Hao says
Attack surface analysis is the examination of a logical or physical infrastructure for security holes that could allow attackers to take advantage and compromise services. While this is a common practice among attackers, it’s also used by security personnel to discover possible attack vectors that could be used against their protected environment’s best interests. This is a very important process for security teams, and will help you understand how vulnerable an infrastructure really is—by observing it from an offensive point of view. Managing your infrastructure’s attack surface is of great importance. Another important but frequently overlooked subject is employee education. This is paramount for managing information in a healthy manner, and for staying alert toward possible anomalies. This rings especially true for people-facing roles like receptionist or call-center attendant, but even IT people such as help desks or DevOps teams should be on the loop of constant security best practices teaching.
Humbert Amiani says
Hi Junhan,
It is common for attackers to conduct good reconnaissance on your systems and map out the possible attack surfaces. Unfortunately, attackers use the same techniques used by security personnel to identify most vulnerabilities, and at times these vulnerabilities can be left unpatched even though they have been discovered by security teams. When effective patch management is not enforced, it is possible to increase the attack surface of any system as components become vulnerable.
Prince Patel says
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open community dedicated to enabling organizations to develop, purchase, and maintain applications and APIs that can be trusted. In this document the OWASP does a great job of listing the top ten information security risks by rating them considering all the elements of the risks including attack vectors, security weaknesses and its impacts. OWASP includes vulnerabilities, preventions, and example attack scenarios.
Anthony Messina says
The OWASP top 10 focuses on identifying the most serious web application security risks for a broad array of organizations. The top attack listed is an injection attempt. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. This issue with injection flaws is that they are easy to discover when examining code. Scanners and fuzzers can help attackers find injection flaws. Injection can result in data loss, corruption, or disclosure to unauthorized parties, loss of accountability, or denial of access. Injection can sometimes lead to complete host takeover. Source code review is the best method of detecting if applications are vulnerable to injections, closely followed by thorough automated testing of all parameters, headers, URL, cookies, JSON, SOAP, and XML data inputs. Another preventative measure is to use a safe API, which avoids the use of the interpreter entirely or provides a parameterized interface, or migrate to use Object Relational Mapping Tools (ORMs).
Humbert Amiani says
Hi Anthony,
It is vital for all use input to be validated and checked before any forwarding within or between applications. As the unwritten rule goes “never trust user input”, since it is common for attackers to try injection attacks. It is not easy isolating valid input from injection commands. However, all commands have a syntax, and can therefore filters can be put in place to ensure such content is filtered out before it reaches the intended target system or application.
Humbert Amiani says
The significance of using system components with known vulnerabilities stands out, due to the ample relations to real world breaches that took advantage of this vector. Organizations often fail to keep track or an inventory of their systems to help them schedule patching when due. This lax way of keeping up with security patches has from time to time been used to exploit some of the most prominent secure systems in use.
This goes along with ensuring that hardware components are upgraded as well since they are part of the system too. Using legacy equipment and systems expose the organization to known vulnerabilities that can be exploited at any time. It is up to the organization to implement a patch management team and ensure they stay on top of all possible loopholes and vulnerabilities to reduce the amount of exposure the system has, to attacks.
Heather Ergler says
I agree that application hardening seems like a difficult task for an organization to manage and that true application hardening requires the hardware components are kept up to date as well. For hardware, it feels like this is best managed by using baseline scanning tools to detect out of date firmware or missing patches centrally within the organization.
Heather Ergler says
I learned in this reading about OWASP has guidelines for developers, security testers, organizations and application managers that clearly outline what each of these roles can do to ensure the security of their applications. For example, application managers should ensure that security activities are part of the budget for the application as a standard. Organizations should determine protection needs for their application portfolio that are driven by privacy laws and regulatory environment. Security testers should use testing strategies using OWASP Security Knowledge Framework and OWASP Application Security Verification Standard. And developers should build applications and APIs using OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM) by tailoring software security for the specific risks facing the organization.