How to leverage security frameworks and libraries for secure code

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. Interested in reading more about SQL injection attacks and why it is a security risk? Databases are often key components for building rich web applications as the need for state and persistency arises. Building a secure product begins with defining what are the security requirements we need to take into account.

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.

A04:2021 – Insecure Design¶

The Top Ten calls for more threat modeling, secure design patterns, and reference architectures. Threat modeling analyzes a system representation to mitigate security and privacy issues early in the life cycle. Secure design patterns and reference architectures provide a positive, secure pattern that developers can use to build new features. DevSecCon is the global DevSecOps community owasp top 10 proactive controls dedicated to bringing developers, operations, and security practitioners together to learn, share, and define the future of secure development. The following “positive” access control design requirements should be considered at the initial stages of application development. Stay tuned for the next blog posts in this series to learn more about these proactive controls in depth.

• This mapping is based the OWASP Proactive Controls version 3.0 (2018).
• Let’s explore each of the OWASP Top Ten, discussing how the pieces of the Proactive Controls mitigate the defined application security risk.
• The OWASP Top Ten Proactive Controls 2018 is a list of security techniques that should be included in every software development project.
• In the end, you walk away with a set of practical guidelines to build more secure software.
• Sometimes developers unwittingly download parts that come built-in with known security issues.

This is part three of GitHub Security Lab’s series on the OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls, where I provide practical guidance for OSS developers and maintainers on improving your security posture. All access control failures should be logged as these may be indicative of a malicious user probing the application for vulnerabilities. Ensure that all request go through some kind of access control verification layer. Technologies like Java filters or other automatic request processing mechanisms are ideal programming artifacts that will help ensure that all requests go through some kind of access control check. The OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls is similar to the OWASP Top 10 but is focused on defensive techniques and controls as opposed to risks.

The OWASP top 10 proactive controls

This includes not just things such as the authentication and authorization of your application, but also the libraries to protect against common types of attacks. It’s important to carefully design how your users are going to prove their identity and how you’re going to handle user passwords and tokens. This should include processes and assumptions around resetting or restoring access for lost passwords, tokens, etc. In this post, you’ll learn how using standard and trusted libraries with secure defaults will greatly help you implement secure authentication. One of the main goals of this document is to provide concrete practical guidance that helps developers build secure software. These techniques should be applied proactively at the early stages of software development to ensure maximum effectiveness.

• Note that X-Xss-Protection is questionable since it adds client-side XSS filters that have proven to be complicated in the past to the point of them being near useless or even used to enable other attacks.
• If you devote your free time to developing and maintaining OSS projects, you might not have the time, resources, or security knowledge to implement security features in a robust, complete way.
• 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.
• A single security-focused library with a large user base across many applications will likely be exercised much more than a single, purpose-written solution for a specific application.

Defining your security requirements is the most important proactive control you can implement for your project. This cheatsheet will help users of the OWASP Proactive Controls identify which cheatsheets map to each proactive controls item. This mapping is based the OWASP Proactive Controls version 3.0 (2018). In summary, this OWASP proactive control is mostly about not reinventing the wheel. Use well-established frameworks that come with “security batteries” included and, if needed, complement them with existing proven components and libraries wherever possible.

The ReadME Project

I’ll keep this post updated with links to each part of the series as they come out. No matter how many layers of validation data goes through, it should always be escaped/encoded for the right context. This concept is not only relevant for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and the different HTML contexts, it also applies to any context where data and control planes are mixed. It is impractical to track and tag whether a string in a database was tainted or not.