How OWASP is likely to benefit a business

OWASP stands for open web application security project. It is not for a profit foundation whose main aim is to enhance the security of the web applications. There has been a major increase in threat levels reported for the online users as there is a need to be focussing on web application security. OWASP is known to develop a number of applications, standards along with learning guides which contributes to the overall health of the internet. This enables an organization to plan, maintain, code and operation of web apps that may be trusted.

The main objective of OWASP is to educate the developers, architects, designers  about the consequences of web security and how to neglect it. This is going to be backed up the top notch security experts and would be supported by a couple of years of research. The ethical hackers have tapped on vulnerabilities from thousands of organizations to share strategies or vulnerabilities when it comes to developing counter measures. Numerous applications are provided that is incorporated intentionally with various security flaws  to train developers on how to avoid the pitfalls that has come into contact before. An OWASP will help an organization to mitiage the risk.

OWASP top 10

The objective of OWASP mobile top 10 is to identity the major risks and underline them for the benefit of an organization. Here are the top 10 risks that have been identified across the internet

• Injection- if you are interpreting any untrusted data source, it is possible to inject them into a query like SQL, LDPL or No SQL. This may set the tone for unintended commands or prevents unauthorized access to information.

• Broken authentication- if the management and user authentication is not handled properly, an attacker obtains access to passwords, exploitation of the system or session tokens to figure out the identity of the users.

• Sensitive data exposure- a Web APIs that is not going to protect sensitive data, always has the risk of leaking out sensitive financial, health or other form of sensitive information. Such an information may require special care as breaches may lead to various forms of thefts.

• XML or external identities- Misconfigured or older XML processors are known to evaluate the external entities with XML documents. Their use may be to disclose the internal files, leading to remote code execution , service or denial attacks along with port scanning.

• Broken access control- there is bound to be restrictions on authenticated user permissions levels that may not be properly enforced whereby it would cause users to modify the data of other person, change permissions. They will not only be able to view the sensitive data but modify the same.

• Security misconfiguration- One of the simplest issue is security misconfiguration. This includes insecure defaults, be it ad hoc configuration or a verbal error message that would be containing sensitive information. All applications, frameworks, libraries, operating systems need to be securely configured and you need to patch up as soon as possible.

• Cross site scripting or XSS- if untrusted data part of a web page is not validated properly or escaped, an attacker may resort to the use of XSS script that is part of the user browser to check out the session. They would end up performing unintended site actions or you will be redirected on to malicious websites.

• Insecure deserialization- if any type of flaws exist in the deserialization of APIs it can lead to remote code execution, privilege escalation attacks, injection attacks or replay attacks.

• Components with known vulnerabilities are to be used- an application component would be running with the same level of access as an application in itself. What it means is that if any vulnerability in any component is exploited it is going to compromise the application defence against such attacks

• Insufficient logging and lack of monitoring- if there is lack of sufficient logging and be it an monitoring system of an internal system or leading to an insufficient response system. An attacker may penetrate the system and would continue to gain access to more system and extract and tamper or extracting information.

The best ways by which security experts analyse the security is via AAA that is authentication, authorization and accounting. But this perspective is not enough to consider all type of vulnerabilities. OWASP top 10 turns out to be important, as organizations have a definite reason to lay emphasis on risks that deserve urgent attention. There has to be a prioritization of every risk that would detect the impact. If you happen to be security conscious then there is a commit to ensure an organization has to consider every type of risk turning out an ideal starting point to be focussing on application security.

Adoption of OWASP compliance that would be part of the software development process along with risk management protocols would be improving the creditability of your organization. OWASP would be setting up a review of the code guidelines or frameworks that will assist the developers resorting to their own penetration testing. The risk has to be measured in relation to the specific form of an environment. When you are conforming to the OWASP standards while getting developers on board, would be becoming more security conscious as it enables an organization to handle vulnerabilities as this would improve the overall security of your applications.

Ever since technology continues to grow and keeps all of us connected, the need and complexity of application security is bound to become hard to address. Platforms like Appsealing can be of considerable help in such cases. In the event of planning to take your security to the next level, standards along with protocols of OWASP are there enabling you to take the step. They are going to provide you with inputs on which areas of security that you need to address the most. Considerable attention is paid to educate the developers and provide you with the necessary tools or technologies to outline strategies for the future.