Fortify’s Application Security Risk Report (2019) showed that 94% of tested applications had at least one security issue not covered by the OWASP Top 10. Furthermore, 61% of tested applications had at least one security issue deemed critical or high severity that was not covered by the OWASP Top 10. This report also analyzed 11,000 applications as mapped to OWASP Top 10 2017 categories.
A1: Injection
Injection flaws can be introduced whenever an untrusted data source is sent to an interpreter. Examples are often found in SQL, LDAP, XPath or NoSQL dynamic database queries with user supplied input. Attackers inject code into the user input, tricking the query interpreter into executing malicious commands.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Injection Flaws?
What’s the Impact of Injection Flaws?
How Can Fortify Help with Injection Flaws?
Broken authentication can be introduced when managing identity or session data in stateful applications. Examples are often found when registration, credential recovery, and API pathways are vulnerable to unexpired session tokens, brute forcing, or account enumeration. Attackers assume the identity of legitimate users, taking control of accounts and compromising data, processes, or systems.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Broken Authentication?
What’s the Impact of Broken Authentication?
How Can Fortify Help?
Sensitive data exposure issues can be introduced when applications access unencrypted data, particularly personally identifiable information (PII) and other regulated data types. Examples are often found when weak cryptographic cyphers are used in legacy applications, secure transport protocols are implemented incorrectly, or data-centric security is not in use. Attackers gain access to sensitive user data that gives them control in real life.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable Sensitive Data Exposure?
What’s the Impact of Sensitive Data Exposure?
How Can Fortify Help with Sensitive Data Exposure?
XML External Entity issues can be introduced when an XML input containing a reference to an external entity is processed by a weakly configured parser. Examples are often found in applications that parse XML input from untrusted sources, when Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are enabled, or that use unpatched frameworks like SOAP 1.0. XML is everywhere—from SVG and image files to networking protocols and document formats such as PDF and RSS. Attackers reference external entities in XML input that results in processors exploited to extract data, execute code remotely, or impact network services.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to XML External Entities?
What’s the Impact of XML External Entities?
How Can Fortify Help with XML External Entities?
Access control issues can be introduced when code and environmental restrictions overlap incompletely or are defined in multiple places for similar functionality. Examples are often found when security-by-obscurity is broken through forceful browsing to restricted pages, or when the application defines complex methods for access control in multiple ways and locations. Attackers can compromise access boundaries to steal sensitive data or disrupt operations.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Broken Access Control?
How Can Fortify Help with Broken Access Control?
What’s the Impact from Broken Access Control?
How Can Fortify Help with Broken Access Control?
Security misconfiguration flaws can be introduced during the configuration of the application or its underlying environment. Misconfiguration can happen at any level of an application stack—from network services and application servers to containers and storage. Examples are often found in default accounts and configurations, "leaky" error messaging, or unpatched frameworks and services. Attackers can gain deployment information and access to privileged data to disrupt operations.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Security Misconfiguration?
What’s the Impact of Security Misconfiguration?
How Can Fortify Help with Security Misconfiguration?
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaws can be introduced when untrusted, un-sanitized user input is executed as part of the HTML, or when users can be influenced to interact with malicious links. Examples are often found when familiar code constructs from languages such as JavaScript or Flash are accepted from untrusted sources or stored for later display by another user agent. Attackers can perform remote code execution on the user's machine, steal credentials, or deliver malware from redirect sites.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)?
There are three forms of XSS, usually targeting user agents such as browsers:
What’s the Impact of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)?
How Can Fortify Help with Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)?
Unsafe deserialization flaws can be introduced when languages and frameworks allow untrusted serialized data to be expanded into an object, often when web applications are communicating user or saving application state. Examples are often found when developers place no restrictions on methods that can self-execute during the deserialization process. Attackers leverage these "gadget chains" called outside of the application logic leverage to remotely execute code, deny service, or gain unauthorized access.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Insecure Deserialization?
What’s the Impact of Insecure Deserialization?
How Can Fortify Help with Insecure Deserialization?
These flaws can be introduced when open source or third-party frameworks and libraries are introduced into an application and run with the same privileges. Examples are often found where component-based development results in a lack of understanding of the risks associated with dependencies and components or systems are difficult or impossible to patch. Attackers have leveraged vulnerable components for some of the largest breaches in history, though vulnerabilities can range from application compromise to remote code execution.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Open Source or Third-party Frameworks and Libraries?
What’s the Impact of Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities?
How Can Fortify Help with Open Source Security?
Insufficient logging and monitoring flaws can be introduced when attack vectors or application misbehavior is not well understood or best practices of monitoring for indicators of compromise are not followed. Examples are often found in legacy systems without logging capabilities, when logs of application penetration testing go unexamined, or when logs do not provide sufficient detail for understanding what attackers did. Attackers rely on an average of around 200 days for detection that is typically discovered externally to establish persistence and pivot to additional vulnerable systems.
What Makes an Application Vulnerable to Insufficient Logging and Monitoring?
What’s the Impact of Insufficient Logging and Monitoring?
Most successful attacks start with vulnerability probing. Allowing such probes to continue can raise the likelihood of successful exploits. Attackers may establish persistence, backdooring applications and operating systems, stealing data, or otherwise gaining unnoticed, unauthorized control of systems. If security critical information is not recorded or stored appropriately, there will be no trail for forensic analysis to discover the source of attack. Understanding that there is a problem at all may become more difficult, or impossible, if the attacker maintains control of logging capabilities.
How Can Fortify Help with Insufficient Logging and Monitoring?
While it has only been four years since the last top 10 was released in 2017, there have been many changes in the cyber security industry which has made us think twice about top priority concerns or which new ones to add. The changes are as follows:
Three new categories were introduced:
A04:2021
Insecure Design: This category focuses on design flaws. This is needed because the movement for shifting left in development requires a shift left for threat modeling as well.
A08:2021
Software and Data Integrity Failures: Focuses on assumptions around software updates, critical data, and the CI/CD pipeline without verifying the integrity they can impact. This also incorporates the A08:2017 – Insecure Deserialization.
A10:2021
Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF): This category is mostly in the top 10 from the community survey. They really stressed this vulnerability because of the above average exploitability and impact.
Other Changes
The other categories either had name changes, moved ranks, or were consolidated into other categories:
For additional information, check out our Developer’s Guide to the OWASP Top 10 2017 with additional information on How Does it Work? And How to Stop It? for each category. You can also watch “What is the OWASP Top 10?” in our AppSec 101 series on the Fortify Unplugged YouTube channel.
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Micro Focus maintains its position as a Magic Quadrant Leader for the third consecutive year in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing.
