OWASP Top Ten Proactive Controls 2018 C7: Enforce Access Controls OWASP Foundation

Even for security practitioners, it’s overwhelming to keep up with every new vulnerability, attack vector, technique, and mitigation bypass. Developers are already wielding new languages and libraries at the speed of DevOps, agility, and CI/CD. Security requirements are categorized into different buckets based on a shared higher order security function.

Authentication is performed by entering username or password or any sensitive information. A security guard stops all guys wearing a red t-shirt who are trying to enter a mall, but anyone else can enter. Whereas a whitelist says that guys wearing white, black and yellow t-shirt are allowed, and the rest all are denied entry. Similarly in programming, we define for a field what type of input and format it can have. Input validation can be implemented on client side using JavaScript and on the server side using any server side language like Java, PHP etc. Implementing server side input validation is compulsory, whereas client side is optional but good to have.

OWASP Proactive Control 5 — validate all inputs

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. Input validation can be implemented in a web application using regular expressions. A regular expression is an object that describes a pattern of characters.

• Secure design patterns and reference architectures provide a positive, secure pattern that developers can use to build new features.
• This requirement contains both an action to verify that no default passwords exist, and also carries with it the guidance that no default passwords should be used within the application.
• Whereas a whitelist says that guys wearing white, black and yellow t-shirt are allowed, and the rest all are denied entry.
• Database injections are probably one of the best-known security vulnerabilities, and many injection vulnerabilities are reported every year.
• It has to be ensured at all times that access certain parts of the application should be accessible to users with certain privileges only.
• As an alternative, you can choose to managed services and benefit from the cloud’s Serverless architecture of services like Auth0.

Ensure that all users, programs, or processes are only given as least or as little necessary access as possible. Be wary of systems that do not provide granular access control configuration capabilities. It should be noted that authorization (verifying access to specific features or resources) is not equivalent to authentication (verifying identity). This cheatsheet will help users of the OWASP Proactive Controls identify which cheatsheets map to each proactive controls item. However, development managers, product owners, Q/A professionals, program managers, and anyone involved in building software can also benefit from this document. A Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) is when an application is used as a proxy to access local or internal resources, bypassing the security controls that protect against external access.

Proactive Controls Index¶

Some of this has become easier over the years (namely using HTTPS and protecting data in transit). You may even be tempted to come up with your own solution instead of handling those sharp edges. In this post, I’ll help you approach some of those sharp edges and libraries with a little more confidence. This lesser-known OWASP project aims to help developers prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced in the first place. This story contains the same message as the traditional requirement from ASVS, with additional user or attacker details to help make the requirement more testable. But this vulnerability can be exploited by converting sensitive information into a hashed format, like in salted MD5 or SHA2 hash format or in encrypted form.

Access control checks should not be implemented at different locations in different application codes. If at any point in time you have to modify an access control check, then you will have to change it at multiple locations, which is not feasible for large applications. Depending upon the programming language a developer uses to build an application, regular expression can easily be implemented in it. Another advantage of regular expressions is that there are many industry tested regular expressions for all popular input types.

OWASP Top 10 Proactive Controls 2018

This document is intended to provide initial awareness around building secure software. This document will also provide a good foundation of topics to help drive introductory software security developer training. These controls should be used consistently and thoroughly throughout all applications. However, this document should be seen as a starting point rather than a comprehensive set of techniques and practices. Data encoding helps to protect a user from different types of attacks like injection and XSS.

• If proper output encoding has been implemented, then even if malicious input was sent, it will not be executed and will be shown as plain text on the client side.
• For any of these decisions, you have the ability to roll your own–managing your own registration of users and keeping track of their passwords or means of authentication.
• The access control or authorization policy mediates what subjects can access which objects.
• A Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) is when an application is used as a proxy to access local or internal resources, bypassing the security controls that protect against external access.
• The document was then shared globally so even anonymous suggestions could be considered.

Authorization is the process of giving someone permission to do or have something. It is to be noted again that authentication is not equivalent to authorization. Here this expression shows owasp proactive controls that username should include alphabets ‚a-z‘, numbers ‚0-9‘ and special characters underscore ‚_‘ only. This regular expression ensures that first name should include characters A-Z and a-z.

Vulnerabilities Prevented

For example, managing access control metadata or building caching for scalability purposes are often additional components in an access control system that need to be built or managed. There are several different types of access control design that should be considered. 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.

• Input validation is a programming technique that ensures only properly formatted data may enter a software system component.
• Supported by industry-leading application and security intelligence, Snyk puts security expertise in any developer’s toolkit.
• Interested in reading more about SQL injection attacks and why it is a security risk?
• Cross Site Scripting (XSS) is the most popular and common vulnerability in Web applications of smallest to biggest vendors with a Web presence or in their products.
• Always treat data as untrusted, since it can originate from different sources which you may not always have insights into.
• Discover tips, technical guides, and best practices in our monthly newsletter for developers.
• Instead, you build proper controls in the presentation layer, such as the browser, to escape any data provided to it.