OWASP, which stands for The Open Web Application Security Project, is an online platform that publishes freely available documentation, methodologies, tools, articles, and technologies in the area of web application security. It provides practical and comprehensive information about computer and Internet based applications trendy security issues. Moreover, it is an international non-profit organization dedicated to web application security. Besides, it is a research based project that provides rankings of and remediation advice for the top 10 most serious web application security vulnerabilities. And it is a framework established to improve the web application security posture of organizations worldwide.
The OWASP Top 10 is a regular guideline outlining security concerns for web application security that focuses on the 10 most critical security risks. And It is a report compiled together by a team of security experts from all over the world. Furthermore, it refers to the Top 10 as an awareness document that recommends organization to incorporate the report into their security processes in order to reduce and mitigate security risks. The goal of OWASP is to help protect web applications from cyberattacks. Additionally, In addition, it provides web application security experts and developers with an understanding about the most security risks.
The OWASP Top 10 change periodically to cope with the security threat landscape. The OWASP Top 10 for 2022 are listed and briefly discussed as follows:
- Broken access control: Access controls are used to prevent users from operating beyond the scope of their specified privileges. Broken access control thus describes a situation where cybercriminals may conduct unauthorized actions with gaining proper permissions and rights.
- Cryptographic failures: It describes security threats that may occur due to usage and implementation of weak or insecure cryptographic algorithms and protocols.
- Injection: Injection attack is an application and a database attack against a web application that uses malicious code and SQL (Structured query language) to access sensitive information or conduct activities without proper authentication.
- Insecure design: Insecure design vulnerability focuses on the design and architectural flaws of web application. Besides, it contains a variety of problems that occur due to missing or inadequate security control design.
- Security misconfiguration: It occurs due to improperly configured privileges or missing security hardening measures across web applications in an organization.
- Vulnerable and outdated components: This security risk happens when the version of software products and applications are out-of-date, vulnerable, and unsupported.
- Identification and authentication failures: security threat that permits default or weak passwords, brute-force attacks, credential stuffing, ineffective multi-factor authentication (MFA), and weak password hashing algorithms.
- Software and data integrity failures: This security vulnerability occurs when organizations do not use digital signatures and when they employ software products of unknown origin or pedigree.
- Security logging and monitoring: It is a security threat that happens when organizations have insufficient log management, detection, monitoring and response options.
- Server-side request forgery: This security risk allows an attacker to induce the server-side application to perform HTTP requests to a random domain of the cybercriminals’ choices.