OWASP Proactive Controls: the answer to the OWASP Top Ten The AppSec and Startup focused blog

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. Of course, security misconfigurations are a much broader category that is valid for many topics other than APIs. However, since APIs are often designed on top of the underlying infrastructure, it may be a simple HTTP server or a shiny API Gateway. Any mistake in this configuration might compromise the entire API and all its endpoints.

Access Control involves the process of granting or denying access request to the application, a user, program, or process. Only the properly formatted data should be allowed entering into the software system. Security requirements provide needed functionality that software needs to be satisfied. It is derived from industry standards, applicable laws, and a history of past vulnerabilities. While the current OWASP Proactive Controls do not match up perfectly with the OWASP Top Ten for 2021, they do a fair job of advising on controls to add to your applications to mitigate the dangers the Top Ten describes.

OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls 2018

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. As software becomes the foundation of our digital—and sometimes even physical—lives, software security is increasingly important. 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.

Insufficient entropy is when crypto algorithms do not have enough randomness as input into the algorithm, resulting in an encrypted output that could be weaker than intended. Details of owasp proactive controls errors and exceptions are useful to us for debugging, analysis, and forensic investigations. They are generally not useful to a user unless that user is attacking your application.

Using Infrastructure as Code

SELinux is the most popular Linux Security Module used to isolate and protect system components from one another. Learn about different access control systems and Linux security as I introduce the foundations of a popular type system. In this post, we’ll deep dive into some interesting attacks on mTLS authentication. We’ll have a look at implementation vulnerabilities and how developers can make their mTLS systems vulnerable to user impersonation, privilege escalation, and information leakages.

• You can do all of this in ways that are practically invisible to the developers using the framework.
• If you’ve been using the OWASP Top 10 as application testing guidance, how best to transition to the much more comprehensive ASVS?
• The Top Ten calls for more threat modeling, secure design patterns, and reference architectures.
• Proactive Controls is a catalog of available security controls that counter one or many of the top ten.
• Some of this has become easier over the years (namely using HTTPS and protecting data in transit).
• It is also very rare when organizations provide developers with prescriptive requirements that guide them down the path of secure software.