OWASP TOP 10 – 2017 Released After Four years – Critical Web Application Security Risks

After four years Open Web Application Security Project(OWASP) released Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks and the last update was in 2013.

Last April OWSAP presented Release Candidate for Top 10 2017 which add’s two new vulnerabilities categories.

• Insufficient Attack Detection and Prevention.
• Underprotected APIs.

With the new release, they have completely refactored the methodology of categorizing risks and employed data call process.

What are the Changes

In 2017 SQL injection stays at the top followed by Broken Authentication. Insecure Direct Object References and Missing Function Level Access Controls merged to A5:2017-Broken Access Control.

Cross-Site Scripting moved from A3:2013 to A7:2017 and Security Misconfiguration from A5:2013 to A6:2017.

Sensitive Data Exposure goes way up from A6:2013 to A3:2017 shows the impacts of recent data exposures.Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities retains the same position A9:2017-Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities.

New Additions – OWASP

A4:2017-XML External Entities (XXE) is a new category primarily supported by source code analysis security testing tools (SAST) data sets.

A8:2017-Insecure Deserialization, which permits remote code execution or sensitive object manipulation on affected platforms.

A10:2017-Insufficient Logging and Monitoring, the lack of which can prevent or significantly delay malicious activity and breach detection, incident response, and digital forensics.

A1:2017- Injection

Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization.

A2:2017-Broken Authentication

Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently

A3:2017-Sensitive Data Exposure

Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial,
healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser

A4:2017-XML External Entities (XXE)

Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks.

A5:2017-Broken Access Control

Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced.
Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc.

A6:2017-Security Misconfiguration

Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched and upgraded in a timely fashion.

A7:2017-Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript.

XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites.

A8:2017-Insecure Deserialization

Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks.

A9:2017-Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities

Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover.

Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts.

A10:2017- Insufficient Logging & Monitoring

Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Also Read:

• A1 – SQL injection
• A2 – Broken Authentication and Session Management
• A4 – Insecure Direct Object References
• A5 – Security Misconfiguration
• A6 – Sensitive Data Exposure
• A7 – Missing Function Level Access Control’
• A8 – Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
• A9 – Using Components with known Vulnerabilities
• A10 – Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards