Here are the top five vulnerabilities from the OWASP of 2023:
- Injection:
- Description: Injection flaws occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s malicious data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. The most common example is SQL injection, but there are also XML, OS, and LDAP injections.
- Impact: Can lead to data theft, data corruption, and sometimes denial of service.
- Mitigation: Use safe API, which avoids the use of the interpreter entirely or provides a parameterized interface.
- Broken Authentication:
- Description: If web applications don’t implement authentication mechanisms correctly, it might allow attackers to compromise authentication tokens or exploit implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently.
- Impact: Can lead to unauthorized access to the system, enabling data theft, system misuse, or even identity theft.
- Mitigation: Implement multi-factor authentication, don’t expose session IDs in URLs, and ensure session timeouts are properly set.
- Sensitive Data Exposure:
- Description: Many web applications fail to properly protect sensitive data like financial, healthcare, and personal details. Attackers might steal or modify weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes.
- Impact: Direct financial loss, identity theft, and potential legal ramifications.
- Mitigation: Encrypt sensitive data both at rest and in transit, and ensure proper key management.
- XML External Entities (XXE):
- Description: Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. This can be exploited to disclose internal files, initiate internal port scanning, execute remote code, and launch denial of service attacks.
- Impact: Data disclosure, remote code execution, and internal system probing.
- Mitigation: Disable the use of external entities in an XML framework, upgrade to a non-vulnerable XML library, or use less complex data formats like JSON.
- Broken Access Control:
- Description: This involves cases where users can access unauthorized functionalities or data. It’s about preventing one user from accessing another user’s data, or an ordinary user from accessing admin functionality.
- Impact: Unauthorized data access, system functionality misuse, and potentially full system control.
- Mitigation: Implement strong role-based access controls, deny by default, and validate and enforce access controls on the server-side.
These vulnerabilities represent just a portion of the many risks to modern web applications, but they are among the most prevalent and potentially damaging. Regularly reviewing and addressing the OWASP Top 5 in your applications is a strong step towards better security.
