OWASP 2013

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a worldwide not-for-profit charitable organization focused on improving the security of software. Their mission is to make software security visible, so that individuals and organizations worldwide can make informed decisions about true software security risks.

For the first time in three years OWASP has updated the top 10 security list. The release notes are summarized below:

The threat landscape for applications security constantly changes. Key factors in this evolution are advances made by attackers, the release of new technologies with new weaknesses as well as more built in defenses, and the deployment of increasingly complex systems. To keep pace, we periodically update the OWASP Top 10. In this 2013 release, we made the following changes:

1. Broken Authentication and Session Management moved up in prevalence based on our data set. Probably because this area is being looked at harder, not because issues are actually more prevalent. This caused Risks A2 and A3 to switch places.
2. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) moved down in prevalence based on our data set from 2010-A5 to 2013-A8. We believe this is because CSRF has been in the OWASP Top 10 for 6 years, and organizations and framework developers have focused on it enough to significantly reduce the number of CSRF vulnerabilities in real world applications.
3. We broadened Failure to Restrict URL Access from the 2010 OWASP Top 10 to be more inclusive.
4. We merged and broadened 2010-A7 & 2010-A9 to CREATE: 2013-A6: Sensitive Data Exposure. This new category was created by merging 2010-A7 – Insecure Cryptographic Storage & 2010-A9 - Insufficient Transport Layer Protection, plus adding browser side sensitive data risks as well. This new category covers sensitive data protection (other than access control which is covered by 2013-A4 and 2013-A7) from the moment sensitive data is provided by the user, sent to and stored within the application, and then sent back to the browser again.
5. We added: 2013-A9: Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. This issue was mentioned as part of 2010-A6 – Security Misconfiguration, but now has a category of its own as the growth and depth of component based development has significantly increased the risk of using components with known vulnerabilities.

There are plenty of resources resources that you can use to address application security in your organization. Here is a link to just some of those additional OWASP resources that can assist your organization in verifying the security of their applications.