Miscellaneous Security

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

I recently did a presentation on the OWASP Top 10 for SecurityStreams. Nitesh Dhanjani of SecurityStreams was nice enough to allow me to embed the videos of the presentations on this site.

If you are new to the OWASP Top 10, I highly suggest to watch this presentation, it is about 45 minutes and should give you a high level understanding of all the OWASP Top 10.

If you are an executive or don’t have time to watch the full presentation, then I suggest watching the 10 minute executive presentation.

Make sure to watch them in HD (Upper right hand corner of the videos). Let me know your thoughts and comments.

OWASP Top 10 – Full Presentation

OWASP Top 10 – Executive Presentation

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Photo: XKCD

SQL Injection is an injection flaw where a web application allows a user to send un-sanitized input into a SQL query.

The textbook example is that a web application has a username field that inserts the user’s input into the following SQL query:

statement = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = '" + userName + "';"

The user then types a' or '1'='1 into the username field. This creates the following SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = 'a' or '1'='1'

If the statement variable is used for the authentication procedure then the evaluation of the SQL statement will always be true.

An attacker can cause damage if they appended something like, '; DROP TABLE users;--

This would produce the following SQL statement:

statement = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = ''; DROP TABLE users;--';

Which would result in the users table being deleted from the Database.

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

When developing a security strategy for web applications many companies have no idea where to begin. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) understood this problem and developed the OWASP Top 10.

The OWASP top 10 are the top 10 vulnerabilities that are found in web applications. If you have an hour or don’t want to read all of these posts, you can simply watch a video.

If you are a developer, you should understand these vulnerabilities. Understanding them is critical into introducing less vulnerabilities into your code.

The OWASP Top 10:
A1 – Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
A2 – Injection Flaws
A3 – Malicious File Execution
A4 – Insecure Direct Object Reference
A5 – Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
A6 – Information Leakage and Improper Error Handling
A7 – Broken Authentication and Session Management
A8 – Insecure Cryptographic Storage
A9 – Insecure Communications
A10 – Failure to Restrict URL Access