What Is Web Application Security?

What is Web Application Security? what is web application security

Web application security is important for any business. Learn about common web application vulnerabilities and how they can be mitigated.

Web application security is the practice of protecting websites, applications, and APIs from attacks. It is a broad field, but its ultimate goals are to keep web applications running smoothly and to protect businesses from cyber vandalism, data theft, unethical competition, and other negative consequences.The global nature of the Internet exposes web applications and APIs to attacks from many locations and varying levels of scale and complexity. As such, web application security encompasses a variety of strategies and covers many parts of the software supply chain.

What are common web application security risks?

Web applications may face a number of types of attacks depending on the attacker's goals, the nature of the targeted organization's business, and the application-specific vulnerabilities. Common attack types include the following:

Zero-day vulnerabilities: These are vulnerabilities unknown to the application's developers, and therefore no fix is available for them. We now see more than 20,000 per year. Attacks seek to exploit these vulnerabilities quickly, often following up by trying to evade the protections put in place by security vendors.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): XSS is a vulnerability that allows attackers to inject client-side scripts into a web page in order to access important information directly, impersonate the user, or trick the user into revealing important information.
SQL Injection (SQi): SQi is a method used by an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in the way a database executes search queries. Attackers use SQi to access unauthorized information, modify or create new user permissions, or manipulate or destroy sensitive data.
Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks: Through a variety of vectors, attackers can overload a targeted server or its surrounding infrastructure with different types of attack traffic. When the server is unable to effectively process incoming requests, it begins to slow down and eventually denies service to legitimate users' incoming requests.
Memory corruption: Memory corruption occurs when a location in memory is unintentionally modified, resulting in the potential for unexpected behavior in the software. Bad actors will attempt to discover and exploit memory corruption through exploits such as code injection or buffer overflow attacks.
Buffer overflow: Buffer overflow is an anomaly that occurs when software writes data to a defined space in memory known as a buffer. Overflowing the buffer causes data to be written to adjacent memory locations. This behavior can be exploited to inject malicious code into memory, potentially creating a vulnerability in the targeted machine.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): Cross-site request forgery involves tricking a victim into submitting a request that uses their authentication or authorization. By leveraging the user's account privileges, the attacker is able to send a request disguised as the user. Once a user's account is compromised, the attacker can compromise, destroy, or modify important information. Highly privileged accounts such as administrators or executives are commonly targeted.
Credential stuffing: Attackers may use bots to rapidly enter large numbers of stolen username and password combinations into a web application's login portal. If this practice allows the attacker to access a real user's account, they may steal the user's data or make fraudulent purchases in the user's name.
Page scraping: Attackers may also use bots to steal content from web pages at scale. They may use this content to gain a pricing advantage over a competitor, to impersonate a page owner for malicious purposes, or for other reasons.
API abuse: APIs, or application programming interfaces, are software that allow two applications to communicate with each other. Like any type of software, they may have vulnerabilities that allow attackers to send malicious code to one of the applications or intercept sensitive data as it moves from one application to another. This is an increasingly common attack type as API usage increases. The OWASP API Top Ten briefly summarizes the main API security risks organizations face today.
Shadow APIs: Development teams move quickly to achieve business goals, and frequently build and deploy APIs without informing security teams. These unknown APIs may expose sensitive company data, operating in the “shadow” because the security teams tasked with protecting APIs are unaware of their existence.
Third-party code abuse: Many modern web applications use a variety of third-party tools – for example, an e-commerce site that uses a third-party payment processing tool. If attackers find a vulnerability in one of these tools, they may be able to compromise the tool and steal the data it processes, prevent it from functioning, or use it to inject malicious code elsewhere in the application. Magecart attacks, which extract credit card data from payment processors, are an example of this type of attack. These attacks are also considered browser supply chain attacks.
Attack surface misconfigurations: An organization's attack surface is the complete IT footprint that can be vulnerable to cyberattacks: servers, devices, SaaS, and cloud assets accessible from the internet. This attack surface can remain vulnerable to attack due to oversight of certain elements or their misconfiguration.

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What are important web application security strategies?

As mentioned earlier, web application security is a broad and ever-changing field. As such, the discipline's best practices change as new attacks and vulnerabilities emerge. But the modern internet threat landscape is active enough that virtually no organization can get by without certain “table stakes” security services that fit the specific needs of their business:

DDoS mitigation: DDoS mitigation services sit between the server and the public internet, using specialized filtering and very high bandwidth capacity to prevent surges of malicious traffic from flooding the server. These services are important because many modern DDoS attacks deliver enough malicious traffic to overwhelm even the most resilient servers.
Web Application Firewall (WAF): Filters traffic that is known or suspected of exploiting web application vulnerabilities. WAFs are important because new vulnerabilities emerge too quickly and quietly for virtually all organizations to detect on their own.
API gateways: Which help identify overlooked “shadow APIs” and block traffic known or suspected of targeting API vulnerabilities. They also help manage and monitor API traffic. (Learn more about API security.)
DNSSEC: A protocol that ensures a web application's DNS traffic is securely routed to the correct servers, so that users are not intercepted by an on-path attacker.
Encryption certificate management: Where a third party manages the key elements of the SSL/TLS encryption process, such as generating private keys, renewing certificates, and revoking certificates due to vulnerabilities. This removes the risk of overlooking those elements and exposing private traffic.
Bot management: Which uses machine learning and other specialized detection methods to distinguish automated traffic from human users, preventing the former from accessing a web application.
Client-side security: Which audits new third-party JavaScript dependencies and third-party code changes, helping organizations detect malicious activity sooner.
Attack surface management: Actionable attack surface management tools should provide a single place to map the attack surface, identify potential security risks, and mitigate risks with a few clicks.

What application security best practices should organizations expect from their vendors?

Web developers can design and build applications in ways that prevent attackers from accessing private data, fraudulently accessing user accounts, and carrying out other malicious actions. The OWASP Top Ten captures the most common application security risks that software developers should be aware of. Practices for preventing these risks include:

Requiring input validation: Blocking improperly formatted data from passing through application workflows helps prevent malicious code from entering the application via an injection attack.
Using modern encryption: Storing user data in an encrypted format, along with using HTTPS to encrypt incoming and outgoing traffic transfers, helps prevent attackers from stealing data.
Providing strong authentication and authorization: Building and enforcing strong password controls, offering multi-factor authentication options including hardware keys, providing access control options, and other practices make it harder for attackers to fraudulently access user accounts and move laterally within your application.
Tracking APIs: Tools exist to identify overlooked “shadow APIs” that can constitute an attack surface, but API security becomes easier when APIs are not overlooked in the first place.
Documenting code changes: Which helps security teams and developers fix newly introduced vulnerabilities sooner.

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What is Web Application Security? what is web application security

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