About OWASP

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open community dedicated to enabling organizations to develop, purchase, and maintain applications that can be  trusted. At OWASP you’ll find free and open ...

•  Application security tools and standards
• Complete books on application security testing, secure code development, and secure code review
• Standard security controls and libraries
• Local chapters worldwide
• Cutting edge research
• Extensive conferences worldwide
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Learn more at: https://www.owasp.org 

All of the OWASP tools, documents, forums, and chapters are free and open to anyone interested in improving application security. We advocate approaching application security as a people, process, and technology problem, because the most effective approaches to application security require improvements in all of these areas. OWASP is a new kind of organization. Our freedom from commercial pressures allows us to provide unbiased, practical, cost-effective information about application security. OWASP is not affiliated with any technology company, although we support the informed use of commercial security technology. Similar to many open source software projects, OWASP produces many types of materials in a collaborative, open way. The OWASP Foundation is the non-profit entity that ensures the project’s long-term success. Almost everyone associated with OWASP is a volunteer, including the OWASP Board, Global Committees, Chapter Leaders, Project Leaders, and project members. We support innovative security research with grants and infrastructure.

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Welcome

Welcome to the OWASP Top 10 2013! This update broadens one of the categories from the 2010 version to be more inclusive of common, important vulnerabilities, and reorders some of the others based on changing prevalence data. It also brings component security into the spotlight by creating a specific category for this risk, pulling it out of the obscurity of the fine print of the 2010 risk A6: Security Misconfiguration.

The OWASP Top 10 for 2013 is based on 8 datasets from 7 firms that specialize in application security, including 4 consulting companies and 3 tool/SaaS vendors (1 static, 1 dynamic, and 1 with both). This data spans over 500,000 vulnerabilities across hundreds of organizations and thousands of applications. The Top 10 items are selected and prioritized according to this prevalence data, in combination with consensus estimates of exploitability, detectability, and impact estimates.

The primary aim of the OWASP Top 10 is to educate developers, designers, architects, managers, and organizations about the consequences of the most important web application security weaknesses. The Top 10 provides basic techniques to protect against these high risk problem areas – and also provides guidance on where to go from here.

What Changed From 2010 to 2013?

The threat landscape for applications security constantly changes. Key factors in this evolution are advances made by attackers, the release of new technologies with new weaknesses as well as more built in defenses, and the deployment of increasingly complex systems. To keep pace, we periodically update the OWASP Top 10. In this 2013 release, we made the following changes:

1) Broken Authentication and Session Management moved up in prevalence based on our data set. We believe this is probably because this area is being looked at harder, not because these issues are actually more prevalent. This caused Risks A2 and A3 to switch places.

2) Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) moved down in prevalence based on our data set from 2010-A5 to 2013-A8. We believe this is because CSRF has been in the OWASP Top 10 for 6 years, and organizations and framework developers have focused on it enough to significantly reduce the number of CSRF vulnerabilities in real world applications.

3) We broadened Failure to Restrict URL Access from the 2010 OWASP Top 10 to be more inclusive: + 2010-A8: Failure to Restrict URL Access is now 2013-A7: Missing Function Level Access Control – to cover all of function level access control. There are many ways to specify which function is being accessed, not just the URL.

4) We merged and broadened 2010-A7 & 2010-A9 to CREATE: 2013-A6: Sensitive Data Exposure:– This new category was created by merging 2010-A7 – Insecure Cryptographic Storage & 2010-A9- Insufficient Transport Layer Protection, plus adding browser side sensitive data risks as well. This new category covers sensitive data protection (other than access control which is covered by 2013-A4 and 2013-A7) from the moment sensitive data is provided by the user, sent to and stored within the application, and then sent back to the browser again.

5) We added: 2013-A9: Using Known Vulnerable Components: + This issue was mentioned as part of 2010-A6 – Security Misconfiguration, but now has a category of its own as the growth and depth of component based development has significantly increased the risk of using known vulnerable components.