What is OWASP?
OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) is a nonprofit organization, founded in 2001 and dedicated to improving software security. It operates on a core principle of openness, all of its materials are freely available and accessible on the project’s website. The OWASP mission is ‘No more insecure software’. The project deals in:
- Supporting the development of impactful projects;
- Developing & nurturing communities through events and chapter meetings worldwide;
- Educational publications & resources providing
The project is well-known and appreciated for creating the “Top 10 Security Risks” list, which highlights the most critical risks for the security for the users and companies to avoid them and build protection against them.
To prevent the risks developers call pentesters or add program details to a special security platform or Responsible Vulnerability Disclosure program (RVDP).
OWASP Top 10
OWASP has been managing the top 10 list of the most critical security risks for a long time and keeps updating it every 2–3 years, as some of the risks become less grave and new ones emerge. The project provides up-to date information provides checklists, which act as web application development standards for the whole world. The project aims at suggesting security experts and developers with their findings in the field of the most frequent risks. It also helps to keep these risks within the limits of their applications. The items in the list are chosen and rated according to the vulnerability seriousness, frequency of security defects and the scale of possible impact.
The most recent (2021) list of top 10 risks includes the following:
- Broken Access Control (94 percent of applications were tested for some form of this weakness)
- Cryptographic Failures
- Injection (94 percent of applications were tested for some form of this vulnerability)
- Insecure Design (design flaws risks)
- Security Misconfiguration (90 percent of applications were tested for some form of this vulnerability)
- Vulnerable and Outdated Components
- Identification and Authentication Failures
- Software and Data Integrity Failures (focuses on the integrity of software updates CI/CD pipelines)
- Security Logging and Monitoring Failures (earlier: ‘Insufficient logging and monitoring’. The least critical vulnerability nowadays)
- Server-Side Request Forgery
OWASP ASVS Standard
The OWASP Application Security Verification Standard project aims at providing:
- a basis for testing web app security controls and security environments;
- a list of requirements for secure development.
This standard can be used to establish a level of confidence in the security of web applications. The requirements were developed with the following goals in mind:
- To provide app developers and app owners with a metric by which to assess the level of confidence in their Web applications,
- To provide guidance to security control developers on what needs to be built into security controls to meet application security requirements, and
- To provide a basis for specifying application security validation requirements in contracts.
Conclusion
Users and developers — on the whole, everyone involved in the field — are familiar with the existence of vulnerabilities and risks, and they need to build defense against the most important errors and attacks. For that risks and their consequences should be found and special standards, classifying and rating them, are of high demand. OWASP is a dedicated web app security project, which provides this information and helps the developers build a stronghold.
About SmartState
Launched in 2019 and based in Dubai, SmartState is one of the leading DeFi security auditing firms. We conduct security tests and check the code core, smart contracts and blockchain for all types of errors, vulnerabilities and other issues.
Although SmartState gave a start to operations with smart contract auditing of DLT-projects, from the very beginning, we made our services surpass the classic purview of smart contract audit and security testing. We specialize in manual testing, so the SmartState’s tech team of white-hat security professionals measure up a project’s git and offer guidelines and recommendations for its further advancement. Security audit reports review the threats and vulnerabilities with which codebases may be exploited in the future, as the network achieves scalability and expands to accommodate more use cases and functionality.
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