James Rock
Cybersecurity vulnerabilities are a critical concern in today’s digital world. Did you know that over 26,000 vulnerabilities were published in 2023? This marks a continuous upward trend in vulnerabilities discovered each year. More than 50% of high-risk vulnerabilities tracked by Qualys last year were exploited by threat actors, ransomware groups, and malware to compromised systems.
For companies that maintain their own software, especially those that are internet-facing (meaning accessible through the internet), it is extremely important for your development team to follow secure coding practices to help ensure that your software does not become compromised. The OWASP Top 10 is a globally recognized standard for web application security, providing a list of the most critical security risks to web applications. This paper outlines best practices for developing secure software, with a focus on addressing the vulnerabilities highlighted in the OWASP Top 10.
What’s OWASP?
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 is a powerful awareness document for web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications. This white paper provides an overview of these risks and offers best practices to mitigate them, ensuring robust and secure software development.
Understanding the OWASP Top 10
- Broken Access Control
- Cryptographic Failures
- Injection
- Insecure Design
- Security Misconfiguration
- Vulnerable and Outdated Components
- Identification and Authentication Failures
- Software and Data Integrity Failures
- Security Logging and Monitoring Failures
- Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
1. Implement Strong Access Controls
It all starts with a good approach around authentication and authorization. Always adopt the Principle of Least Privilege, meaning grant users only the permissions they need to perform their tasks.
Access Control Models to use can be Role-based or Attribute-based.
Inspect what you expect and conduct regular audits of access controls to ensure they are up-to-date and properly configured.
2. Ensure Robust Cryptography
Employ modern and strong cryptographic algorithms. Avoid older versions of SSL that have been deprecated, and weak algorithms like MD5.
Implement secure key management practices, including key rotation and secure storage.
Encrypt sensitive data (e.g. PII, PHI, Financial data, etc.) both at rest and in transit using industry-standard encryption protocols.
3. Prevent Injection Attacks
Input Validation is critical for your security. Validate and sanitize all user inputs to prevent injection flaws such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injections.
The use of dynamic queries is something that leaves a lot of applications vulnerable. Use prepared statements and parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection attacks.
Implement Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks to reduce the risk of injection attacks.
4. Adopt Secure Design Principles
Integrate security considerations into the design process rather than treating them as an afterthought. Conduct threat modeling during the design phase to identify potential security threats and plan mitigations, and layer security controls to provide multiple layers of defense. Finally, integrate periodic penetration testing into your security plan to confirm that you are covering as much as possible.
5. Avoid Security Misconfigurations
Change default credentials (i.e., usernames and passwords) and disable default accounts to prevent unauthorized access to protected resources. When possible, use automated tools to maintain and verify secure configurations across environments and keep software and dependencies up to date with the latest security patches.
6. Manage Vulnerable and Outdated Components
Every software project uses 3rd party components and very often these can be left without updates for years, leaving you exposed to known vulnerabilities. Be sure to maintain an inventory of all frameworks, libraries (including 3rd party), and other dependencies and be diligent in applying updates to ensure you are as protected as possible.
Consider leveraging automated tools to scan for vulnerabilities in components.
7. Secure Authentication and Session Management
Enforce strong password policies, including complexity requirements and regular password changes, and implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to add an additional layer of security.
Ensure you are securely managing user sessions, including proper session timeout and invalidation mechanisms. Lastly don’t forget to log any and all attempts of who is successfully and unsuccessfully logging in to your application.
8. Ensure Software and Data Integrity
Use digital signatures to verify the integrity and authenticity of software. Implement integrity checks for critical files and data to detect unauthorized modifications. Define and follow secure deployment practices to prevent unauthorized access and modification during deployment.
9. Implement Comprehensive Logging and Monitoring
As emphasized in bullet #7, log all access and modification events (data changes) to detect potential security incidents. Follow a “Who, What, When” pattern to know who changed what, and when.
Define and use centralized logging solutions for efficient log management and analysis and build alerting mechanisms that give you an actionable item, versus alerts that just provide FYIs, as they tend to get ignored. Establish incident response procedures to react quickly to security events.
10. Mitigate Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
Validate and sanitize all inputs that can influence the generation of server-side requests. Restrict access to internal resources that should not be accessible via SSRF. Implement controls to restrict and monitor outbound requests from the server.
Conclusion
Integrating these best practices into the development process in your organization is easier and less expensive than correcting issues found during user testing, or worse, after an application has been released to production. The risk and costs associated with a security breach can be detrimental to an organization, therefore, it’s critical to implement best practices within your team to keep your information safe.
Need help implementing these practices? Contact Asinpa and we can put safeguards in place to increase security and efficiency. Call or visit www.asinpa.com today for more information.
References
1. OWASP Top 10 (https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/)
2. NIST Cybersecurity Framework (https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework)
3. SANS Institute (https://www.sans.org/)
4. CIS Controls (https://www.cisecurity.org/controls/)