OWASP Top 10 - 2017

I wrote about OWASP at University nearly five years ago and, today, I don’t know yet if there is some subject about it to learn main web issues and how to keep them away thus we’ll have many Web Application Vulnerabilities if web engineers don’t study, and they don’t know, how to develop secure Web Services and WebSockets. Once web applications are developed, with vulnerabilities or not, there should be mandatory to install a Web Application Firewall to protect our organization of new vulnerabilities, DoS attacks, Web Scraping, etc.

When I was at University, I learnt to develop with Pascal, C/C++ and Assembly languages, although I learnt a little bit about PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Java as well. I developed applications without thinking about publishing to Internet, just basic web pages, but, today, web applications are behind an API or RESTful web service to be consumed by Single Page Applications (SPAs) and mobile applications. In addition, microservices written in node.js and Spring Boot are replacing traditional monolithic applications which have security challenges like establishing trust between microservices, containers, secret management, etc. On the other hand, modern web frameworks have been released such as Bootstrap, Electron, Angular and React which run functionalities on the client-side while traditional frameworks run functionalities on the server-side.

The difference between the monolithic and microservices architecture

Many changes have had over the last years and, therefore, OWASP Top 10 has been updated. For instance, we have a new category called A4 – XML External Entities (XXE) because new issues have been identify in older or poorly configured XML processors when they evaluate external entity references within XML documents.

A4 – XML External Entities (XXE)

Insecure Direct Object References and Missing Function Level Access Control have been merged into A5 – Broken Access Control where restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced.

A5 – Broken Access Control

A8 – Insecure Deserialization is another new category into OWASP Top 10, which, initially, is difficult to exploit. However, a successful exploitation could lead to remote code execution and it can also be used for replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks.

A8 – Insecure Deserialization

Last change to the OWASP Top 10 has been to add the category A10 – Insufficient Logging and Monitoring because many organizations don’t have security tools and processes to detect malicious activities and data breaches and, as a result, they become aware of a security breach by external parties with more than an average of 200 days of delay.

A10 – Insufficient Logging and Monitoring

This has been an overview of changes in OWASP Top 10 – 2017 where there is also to highlight other security risks like Injection or Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) which keep the importance into the OWASP Top 10.

What changed from 2013 to 2017?

Regards my friends, protect your web servers and keep studying!!