OWASP Top Ten Proactive Controls 2018 Introduction OWASP Foundation
The OWASP Top Ten Proactive Controls 2018 is a list of security techniques that should be included in every software development project. They are ordered by order of importance, with control number 1 being the most important. This document was written by developers for developers to assist those new to secure development. Using secure coding libraries and software frameworks with embedded security helps software developers guard against security-related design and implementation flaws.
The list goes on from injection attacks protection to authentication, secure cryptographic APIs, storing sensitive data, and so on. 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.
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And preserve the integrity of logs, just in case someone tries to tamper with them. The first step in protecting your data is to classify it so you can map out your strategy for protecting it based on the level of sensitivity. Such a strategy owasp top 10 proactive controls should include encrypting data in transit as well as at rest. Digital identity, authentication, and session management can be very challenging, so it’s wise to have your best engineering talent working on your identity systems.
Secure access to databases can help thwart injection attacks, which are on the OWASP Top 10 list, and weak server-side control flaws, which are on the OWASP Mobile Top 10 list of vulnerabilities. First, you need to find and choose the requirements for your software. Next, you review how the application stacks up against the security requirements and document the results of that review. Finally, create test cases to confirm the requirements have been implemented.
OWASP Proactive Control 7 — enforce access control
Broken Access Control is when an application does not correctly implement a policy that controls what objects a given subject can access within the application. 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.
Defining these requirements ensures that a foundation of security functionality is required during your development. OWASP once again has created a useful document to assist with this and it’s called the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS). 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. 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.
What are the OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls?
This document is intended to provide initial awareness around building secure software. 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.
- This mapping is based the OWASP Proactive Controls version 3.0 (2018).
- Security requirements provide a foundation of vetted security functionality for an application, the OWASP team explained in a document on the project.
- Always treat data as untrusted, since it can originate from different sources which you may not always have insights into.
- The OWASP Top Ten Proactive Controls describes the most important controls and control categories that every architect and developer should absolutely, 100% include in every project.
- 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.