Developing secure software: how to implement the OWASP top 10 Proactive Controls

The answer is with security controls such as authentication, identity proofing, session management, and so on. But developers have a lot on their plates and asking them to become familiar with every single vulnerability category under the sun isn’t always feasible. Even for security practitioners, it’s overwhelming to keep up with every new vulnerability, attack vector, technique, and mitigation bypass. Developers are already wielding new languages and libraries at the speed of DevOps, agility, and CI/CD. OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls describes the most important control and control categories that every architect and developer should absolutely, 100% include in every project. The Top 10 Proactive Controls are by developers for developers to assist those new to secure development. The OWASP® Foundation works to improve the security of software through its community-led open source software projects, hundreds of chapters worldwide, tens of thousands of members, and by hosting local and global conferences.

• 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.
• He is a Microsoft MVP for Developer Security / Visual Studio and Development Technologies and he holds the 2 CSSLP security certification.
• As expected, secure queries, which relates to SQL injection, is the top item.
• “Giving developers guidance that was practical was challenging. The OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls helped a lot.”

The Web Application Top 10 list is thought to be the initial standard for protecting security for each of these industry platforms. In an effort to improve security for credit cards, the Payment Card Industry dictates that any application accepting or using credit cards must not have any OWASP Web Application Top 10 vulnerabilities. OWASP recommends developers build in TLS security from the beginning of each project. Other examples that require escaping data are operating system command injection, where a component may execute system commands that originate from user input, and hence carry the risk of malicious commands being executed. Building a secure product begins with defining what are the security requirements we need to take into account.

A04 Insecure Design

An object is a resource defined in terms of attributes it possesses, operations it performs or are performed on it, and its relationship with other objects. A subject is an individual, process, or device that causes information to flow among objects or change the system state. The access control or authorization policy mediates what subjects can access which objects. It is impractical to track and tag whether a string in a database was tainted or not. Instead, you build proper controls in the presentation layer, such as the browser, to escape any data provided to it. A prominent OWASP project named Application Security Verification Standard—often referred to as OWASP ASVS for short—provides over two-hundred different requirements for building secure web application software.

• Listed with respect to priority and importance, these ten controls are designed to augment the standards of application security.
• Even for security practitioners, it’s overwhelming to keep up with every new vulnerability, attack vector, technique, and mitigation bypass.
• They have come up with a Top 10 list that focuses on identifying and preventing common security mistakes in architecture and design.
• We will go over numerous security anti-patterns and their secure counterparts.
• As part of this workshop attendees will receive a state-of-the-art DevSecOps tool-chest comprising of various open-source tools and scripts to help the DevOps engineers in automating security within the CI/CD pipeline.

Discussions focus on the process of raising awareness with knowledge/training and building out a program. The practical portion includes discussion of rolling out proactive controls and hands-on time with JuiceShop. These focus on requirements, code review, best practices, development libraries, and building software without known vulnerabilities. This group includes ASVS, SAMM, threat owasp top 10 proactive controls modeling, Code Review guide, and the testing guide. The end-to-end world of the developer is explored, from requirements through writing code. The working portion includes using ASVS to assess a sample app, threat modeling a sample app, and using SAMM for a sample assessment. This group focuses on tools, including the testing guide, Dependency Check, Threat Dragon, CRS, and ZAP.

The OWASP top 10 proactive controls

This includes how a risk is discovered, the tactics, tools, and procedures attackers use to exploit it, and how attackers will react to resistance. As documented in the API Protection Report, First Half 2022, the CQ Prime Threat Research blocked roughly 3.6 billion malicious requests, making API10+ the second largest API security threat mitigated during this timeframe. OWASP stands for the Open Web Application Security Project, a nonprofit foundation that works to improve the security of software. The major thrust of OWASP comes down to projects run by groups of individuals that are part of OWASP chapters worldwide. OWASP is a large, global organization of dedicated professionals who volunteer their time and talents to make software more secure. In some cases, the lists have been used with tunnel vision, resulting in security gaps. While the OWASP Web Application and API Security Top 10 lists are the most common and well known security lists, OWASP has a wide range of lists that may be applicable to your organization.

Everyone knows the OWASP Top Ten as the top application security risks, updated every few years. Proactive Controls is a catalog of available security controls that counter one or many of the top ten. Once authentication is taken care of, authorization should be applied to make sure that authenticated users have the permissions to perform any actions they need but nothing beyond those actions is allowed. In this post, you’ll learn more about the different types of access control and the main pitfalls to avoid. You will walk away from this training with an overview of current best practices, along with actionable advice on implementing them. These 10 application risks are dangerous because they may allow attackers to plant malware, steal data, or completely take over your computers or web servers.

Training Program

The OWASP Top 10 is written more for security testers and auditors than for developers. The Open Web Application Security Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing unbiased, practical information about application security. DevSecCon is the global DevSecOps community dedicated to bringing developers, operations, and security practitioners together to learn, share, and define the future of secure development. Integrating directly into development tools, workflows, and automation pipelines, Snyk makes it easy for teams to find, prioritize, and fix security vulnerabilities in code, dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. Supported by industry-leading application and security intelligence, Snyk puts security expertise in any developer’s toolkit.

Another example is the question of who is authorized to hit APIs that your web application provides. In this series, I’m going to introduce the OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls one at a time to present concepts that will make your code more resilient and enable your code to defend itself against would-be attackers. When possible, I’ll also show you how to create CodeQL queries to help you ensure that you’re correctly applying these concepts and enforcing the application of these proactive controls throughout your code.

Headwinds, Crosswinds and Tailwinds: Securing the Cloud in Turbulent Times

Regardless of what list you may choose to use for your security initiative, these lists are ranked as top 10s because they describe the most severe threats. This means that these lists should be used as a starting point and organizations should always look beyond the top 10 lists to find the other many hundreds of threats their organization may be subject to. Software development organizations should accept this document in response to make it more secure their applications globally.