OWASP Compliance: Roadmap for Standards-Compliant Applications

Quick Summary: Whether you are a tech giant or a small organization, securing your web application is of utmost importance. Meeting all the necessary standards and regulations is a crucial step in this process. OWASP is one of the most important standards you must comply with. It provides essential web application practices to bolster security and mitigate cyber risks. This blog sheds light on OWASP compliance to help you meet this crucial standard and boost your security posture.

Twitter saw a massive data breach a few years ago that resulted in the disclosure of data of billions of users. The reason for this breach was found to be broken authentication. It means there was a flaw in the authentication mechanism of the application.

Attackers exploited the vulnerability to steal users’ data by achieving successful unauthorized access to the application. This shows how even large organizations undermine the need for robust application security.

Broken authentication is one of the critical security risks listed in the OWASP top ten. OWASP is an important standard for achieving web application security that provides crucial guidelines and best practices to enhance security.

It provides a list of critical security risks and best practices to eliminate them. Adhering to OWASP compliance enables you to build and deploy secure applications.

Scale Up Your AppSec Capabilities with ZeroThreat to Achieve Compliance Seamlessly Try for $0

What is OWASP Compliance?

OWASP offers standard guidelines and methods to mitigate cyber risks. It offers a list of the most critical cyber security risks for web applications under OWASP Top 10. These risks have been decided based on the broader consensus of security professionals and developers around the world.

OWASP compliance ensures that these risks are considered when developing applications. This means that developers must adhere to the guidelines and best practices defined by the Open Web Application Security Project.

By adopting these best practices and guidelines, your organization can ensure the building of secure web applications from scratch and avoid cyber risks. It eliminates the chances of vulnerabilities and reduces your attack surface.

Apart from this, it also serves as a critical framework for security testing. Your security team must check for these critical risks when evaluating your web application to eliminate potential security risks.

Understanding OWASP Top 10 - The Foundation of Compliance

When it comes to complying with OWASP, there is an important role of the top 10 web application risks defined by this organization. It is known as the OWASP Top 10, which lists the most critical security risks in web applications.

Your organization can achieve OWASP compliance by addressing the web application risks mentioned in this list with a proactive approach. It will enable you to ensure secure applications and data as well as maintain user trust.

Let’s understand these top 10 risks in detail.

Broken Access Control

In the case of broken access control, an attacker has access to data or resources they are not entitled to. Typically, an attacker will exploit the flaws in how an application manages access to the data or resource and gain unauthorized access to it.

With this kind of security weakness, an attacker could easily access sensitive data, threatening users’ identity and privacy.

OWASP compliance requires you to:

• Deny access by default except for public resources.
• Ensure consistent implementation of security controls throughout an application.
• Model access controls should verify record ownership before allowing CRUD functions.
• Disable web server directory listing.
• Ensure there are no backup files or metadata files in the web root.
• Access control failures should be logged.
• Rate limit controller access and API.
• Ensure stateless JWT tokens are short-lived.

Cryptographic Failures

Data encryption in transit is necessary for secure communication between two systems on the internet. However, if there is a lack of encryption or the existing encryption is weak, an attacker could decrypt the data or information transmitted over the internet.

It is known as cryptographic failures that occur when data breaches happen due to no or weak encryption. The attacker can intercept the communication and obtain the data. Ensuring strong encryption and transmitting data over HTTPs is the way to prevent cryptographic failures.

You can comply with OWASP by following the below practices for this attack vector:

• Don’t store data that is not required and discard data once it is no longer needed.
• All data at rest must be encrypted.
• Use strong and the latest encryption algorithms, keys, and protocols.
• Use secure protocols like TLS with forward secrecy to encrypt data in transit.
• Disallow caching of responses containing sensitive information.
• Avoid transporting sensitive data via legacy protocols like SMTP or FTP.
• Passwords must be stored with strong salted hashes.
• Prefer authenticated encryption over simple encryption.

Injections

Injections are among the most common types of web application vulnerabilities. They occur due to improper input validation and sanitization. Due to this flaw, an attacker can execute malicious code or scripts by inserting them into input fields.

For example, SQL injection is a kind of attack that happens when a web application executes user-supplied input containing malicious scripts without sanitization and validation. Injection attacks can be avoided by implementing proper input validation and sanitization.

The following best practices for injections help you ensure OWASP compliance:

• Use a safe API that depends on ORMs or a parameterized interface.
• Leverage positive server-side input validation.
• Use escape special characters for residual dynamic queries.
• Limit the number of records by using LIMIT in queries.

Find and Fix Vulnerabilities Before Hackers Do to Protect Your Sensitive Data Scan for Risks

Insecure Design

It refers to the flaws and loopholes that were introduced during the design phase of an application’s development cycle. Insecure design occurs due to a vulnerable architecture or structure of an application.

This type of flaw can lead to various vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting, broken authentication, injection, and more. There are many ways to prevent these vulnerabilities; one is to implement a content security policy.

OWASP provides the following best practices for this:

• Use threat modeling for business logic, access control, authentication, and flows.
• Establish and use secure design patterns.
• Check critical flows are resistant to threat modeling by writing and integrating unit tests.
• Separate tier layers on the network and system layers.
• Limit the consumption of resources by a service or user.

Security Misconfigurations

This is a type of vulnerability that occurs due to improper configuration of an application or server. Misconfigurations are among the common security issues that lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Common security misconfigurations include using a default password, not using SSL/TLS, and not having proper restrictions on files/directories. There are many ways to prevent misconfiguration like adding a load balancer.

Follow the best practices below for OWASP compliance:

• Implement a minimal platform removing unnecessary features and components.
• Review and update configurations.
• Choose a segmented application architecture.
• Apply security headers in responses.
• Leverage automated checks to verify settings and configurations.

Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Vulnerable and outdated components are another type of fatal loophole that offers a golden opportunity for attackers to steal data. Outdated components are those for which no patch or update is available. Applications with outdated components are more susceptible to cyberattacks.

The following are the best practices to comply with OWASP:

• Remove unnecessary components and features, unused dependencies, unwanted files, and documents.
• Get components from only secure sources.
• Prefer signed packages.
• Monitor the unmaintained libraries and components.

Identification and Authentication Failures

These are kinds of security flaws that can’t properly identify and authenticate users. Due to this flaw, an attacker can access sensitive data by tampering with methods like brute-forcing and credential stuffing. This type of flaw can result in various security issues like insecure deserialization, session hijacking, and more.

OWASP compliance requires you to follow the practices below to tackle this:

• Implement multi-factor authentication wherever possible.
• Make sure not to use default credentials, especially for admin roles.
• Follow the NIST standard’s guidelines for policies related to password length, complexity, and rotation.
• Delay or limit failed input attempts.
• Use a server-side session manager to generate session IDs with high entropy after login.

Software and Data Integrity Failures

It is a kind of security flaw that allows an attacker to delete or modify data. Attackers leverage this attack tactic to access sensitive data or cause damage to the system. Preventing this vulnerability is crucial to avoid financial losses and exposure of sensitive data.

OWASP has the following best practices for this:

• Ensure software or data is from a valid source by using mechanisms like digital signatures.
• Check software components for known vulnerabilities.
• Ensure code or configuration changes are reviewed to identify any flaws.
• Make sure proper access control, configuration, and separation for the CI/CD pipeline.

Security Logging and Monitoring Failures

This type of vulnerability occurs due to issues with logging and monitoring. When it comes to understanding the health of an application, logging and monitoring play an important role. However, flaws in this service can result in the exposure of sensitive system information that attackers can exploit to carry out cyberattacks.

OWASP compliance provides the following practices to mitigate this risk:

• Log access control or login failures with user context.
• Logs must be generated in a format consumable by log management solutions.
• Ensure encryption of log data.
• Adopt an incident response and recovery plan.

Server-Side Request Forgery

Server-side request forgery occurs when an attacker tricks a server into making an unintended request to an external or internal resource. As a result, an attacker can gain access to sensitive data or internal networks, causing huge problems for the concerned organization.

There are several best practices defined by OWASP to mitigate SSRF (Server-side Request Forgery) risk as given below.

• Use separate networks for remote resource access functionality.
• Apply a “deny by default” policy for network access controls and firewalls.
• Validate and sanitize all user-supplied data before use.
• Don’t send raw responses.
• Disallow HTTP redirections.

Conduct AI-powered Security Audits 5X Faster and Uncover Threats with 98.9% Accuracy Start for Free

Achieve OWASP Compliance with ZeroThreat

Security vulnerabilities are a major problem for web applications that result in costly data breaches. So, identifying and addressing these vulnerabilities is crucial to protect your application from attackers.

OWASP security best practices help you eliminate the ten critical risks in web applications that are the reason for most data breaches. By achieving compliance with OWASP practices and guidelines, you can ensure that your application is protected from top threats.

ZeroThreat’s AI-powered vulnerability scanning can help you achieve OWASP compliance flawlessly, as it can precisely identify the top ten web application risks like broken access, injection, server-side request forgery, misconfigurations, and more.

Try it in real time to know its benefits.