OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls 2018: How it makes your code more secure

In this session, Jim walked us through the list of OWASP Top 10 proactive controls and how to incorporate them into our web applications. If you devote your free time to developing and maintaining OSS projects, you might not have the time, resources, or security knowledge to implement security features in a robust, complete way. In this blog post, I’ll discuss the importance of establishing the different components and modules you’ll need in your project and how to choose frameworks and libraries with secure defaults.

The expanded use of third-party and open-source components in applications has contributed to this item’s rise in importance. It’s highly likely that access control requirements take shape throughout many layers of your application. For example, when pulling data from the database in a multi-tenant SaaS application, where you need to ensure that data isn’t accidentally exposed for different users. Another example is the question of who is authorized to hit APIs that your web application provides. There is no specific mapping from the Proactive Controls for Insecure Design. The Top Ten calls for more threat modeling, secure design patterns, and reference architectures.

A06:2021 – Vulnerable and Outdated Components¶

Supported by industry-leading application and security intelligence, Snyk puts security expertise in any developer’s toolkit. The answer is with security controls such as authentication, identity proofing, session management, and so on. You need to protect data whether it is in transit (over the network) or at rest (in storage). Some of this has become easier over the years (namely using HTTPS and protecting data in transit). You may even be tempted to come up with your own solution instead of handling those sharp edges. In this post, I’ll help you approach some of those sharp edges and libraries with a little more confidence.

• So, I’ll also show you how to use invariant enforcement to make sure that there are no unjustified deviations from such defaults across the full scope of your projects.
• As an alternative, you can choose to managed services and benefit from the cloud’s Serverless architecture of services like Auth0.
• You may even be tempted to come up with your own solution instead of handling those sharp edges.
• Threat modeling analyzes a system representation to mitigate security and privacy issues early in the life cycle.
• This cheatsheet will help users of the OWASP Proactive Controls identify which cheatsheets map to each proactive controls item.

Other examples that require escaping data are operating system (OS) command injection, where a component may execute system commands that originate from user input, and hence carry the risk of malicious commands being executed. Interested in reading more about SQL injection attacks and why it is a security risk? Our freedom from commercial pressures allows us to provide unbiased, practical, cost effective information about application security. This blog post describes two linked vulnerabilities found in Frigate, an AI-powered security camera manager, that could have enabled an attacker to silently gain remote code execution.

How to Use this Document¶

This includes making sure no sensitive data, such as passwords, access tokens, or any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is leaked into error messages or logs. Software and data integrity failures include issues that do not protect against integrity failures in software creation and runtime data exchange between entities. One example of a failure involves using untrusted software in a build pipeline to generate a software release.

Michael Leung, a management consultant with Canadian Cybersecurity Inc., used to manage security training for developers at a large financial institution in Canada. Ken Prole, chief technology officer for Code Dx, said the new recommendations speak the language of developers and make it easy to understand what they should be worrying about when creating secure applications. Handling errors and exceptions properly ensures no backend information is disclosed to any attackers. For example, an SQL exception will disclose where in the SQL query the maliciously crafted input is and which type of database is being used. As vulnerabilities are discovered in them, you need to ensure continuous updates are applied to them to reduce exposure. Databases are often key components for building rich web applications as the need for state and persistency arises.

The Top 10 Proactive Controls¶

First, security vulnerabilities continue to evolve and a top 10 list simply can’t 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. Let’s explore each of the OWASP Top Ten, discussing how the pieces of the Proactive Controls mitigate the defined application security risk. By having an application generate data for security, you can provide valuable information for intrusion detection systems and forensic analysis, as well as help your organization meet compliance requirements. Input validation ensures that only properly formatted data may enter a software system component. The controls, introduced in 2014, have filled a gap for practitioners preaching the gospel of security to developers.

• Michael Leung, a management consultant with Canadian Cybersecurity Inc., used to manage security training for developers at a large financial institution in Canada.
• This blog post describes two linked vulnerabilities found in Frigate, an AI-powered security camera manager, that could have enabled an attacker to silently gain remote code execution.
• A subject is an individual, process, or device that causes information to flow among objects or change the system state.
• Always treat data as untrusted, since it can originate from different sources which you may not always have insights into.

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. The list goes on from injection attacks protection to authentication, owasp controls secure cryptographic APIs, storing sensitive data, and so on. It lists security requirements such as authentication protocols, session management, and cryptographic security standards. Most importantly, the ASVS provides a phased approach to gradually implement security requirements as you are making your first steps.

Securing our home labs: Frigate code review

This document will also provide a good foundation of topics to help drive introductory software security developer training. These controls should be used consistently and thoroughly throughout all applications. However, this document should be seen as a starting point rather than a comprehensive set of techniques and practices.

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. Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic, noted that database control requires developers to think not only about the security of their application but where that application stores its data.