OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls for Software Developers

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• 04/10/2021
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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. 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. Another example is insecure deserialization, where an application receives an object from another entity and does not properly validate that object, resulting in an attack being loosed upon the application that received the object.

• Security requirements provide a foundation of vetted security functionality for an application, the OWASP team explained in a document on the project.
• The list is “critical to moving the industry forward with ‘security left’ initiatives,” Kucic said.
• 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.
• The OWASP Foundation is a not-for-profit entity that ensures the project’s long-term success.

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.

Sophos Firewall Code Injection Flaw: Let Attackers Execute Remote Code

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. Two great examples of secure defaults in most web frameworks are web views that encode output by default (providing https://remotemode.net/become-a-java-developer-se-9/owasp-proactive-controls/ XSS attack defenses) as well as built-in protection against Cross-Site Request Forgeries. Sometimes though, secure defaults can be bypassed by developers on purpose. 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. Security requirements provide a foundation of vetted security functionality for an application, the OWASP team explained in a document on the project.

• The Top Ten calls for more threat modeling, secure design patterns, and reference architectures.
• Client-side and server-side validation ensure that client-side data is never trusted, while blacklisting and whitelisting of input work to prevent attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).
• The input is interpreted as a command, processed, and performs an action at the attacker’s control.
• Using secure coding libraries and software frameworks with embedded security helps software developers guard against security-related design and implementation flaws.
• Recently, I was thinking back at a great opening session of DevSecCon community we had last year, featuring no other than Jim Manico.
• The full list and their challenges can be found within the OWASP standard.

OWASP once again has created a useful document to assist with this and it’s called the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS). As application developers, we are used to logging data that helps us debug and trace issues concerning wrong business flows or exceptions thrown. Security-focused logging is another type of data logs that we should strive to maintain in order to create an audit trail that later helps track down security breaches and other security issues. 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. However, development managers, product owners, Q/A professionals, program managers, and anyone involved in building software can also benefit from this document.

Encoding and escaping untrusted data to prevent injection attacks

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. 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. Building a secure product begins with defining what are the security requirements we need to take into account. Just as business requirements help us shape the product, security requirements help us take into account security from the get-go.

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. Kucic maintained that developers must safeguard all access to their data, and not assume it will be protected by someone else, such as a database administrator.

Proactive Controls

Each category contains a collection of requirements that represent the best practices for that category drafted as verifiable statements. Developers write only a small amount of custom code, relying upon these open-source components to deliver the necessary functionality. Vulnerable and outdated components are older versions of those libraries and frameworks with known security vulnerabilities. There is no specific mapping from the Proactive Controls for Insecure Design.

• 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.
• The injection-style attacks come in many flavors, from the most popular SQL injection to command, LDAP, and ORM.
• The OWASP Top Ten Proactive Controls 2018 is a list of security techniques that should be included in every software development project.
• Threat modeling analyzes a system representation to mitigate security and privacy issues early in the life cycle.
• The ASVS requirements are basic verifiable statements which can be expanded upon with user stories and misuse cases.
• Checking and constraining those inputs against the expectations for those inputs will greatly reduce the potential for vulnerabilities in your application.

To discover if your developers have properly implemented all of the above, an application security assessment is recommended that will test against all of the OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks. Once you decide which test is required, you can contact us for more information on the testing. Most applications use a database to store and obtain application data.

OWASP Top 10 Proactive Security Controls For Software Developers to Build Secure Software

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an organization that solely specializes in the knowledge of software security. OWASP uses their knowledge to create lists for top risks and proactive controls, application security standards, and prevention cheat sheets for remediating specific risks. The OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks is continuously updated to showcase the most critical application security risks. The risks are always used as a baseline to test against when conducting any vulnerability or penetration tests.

Input validation is all about ensuring inputs are presented to the server in its expected form (e.g., an email can only be in email format). Client-side and server-side validation ensure that client-side data is never trusted, while blacklisting and whitelisting of input work to prevent attacks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). The full list and their challenges can be found within the OWASP standard. 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. Security requirements define the security functionality of an application.

Upcoming OWASP Global Events

The OWASP Proactive Controls is one of the best-kept secrets of the OWASP universe. 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.