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What is OWASP?

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) is a global non-profit organization focused on improving the security of software. OWASP provides free tools, standards, and frameworks to assist developers, security professionals, and organizations in building secure software. Its projects offer methodologies to secure mobile applications and guide security best practices.

Summary

OWASP offers practical frameworks and tools to help organizations develop secure applications.

Key OWASP initiatives are standards and guides to help developers identify security gaps, ensure compliance with best practices, and build resilient software. Some of them are:

  • OWASP MASVS (Mobile Application Security Verification Standard): A framework that provides a methodology to assess the security of mobile applications, helping developers align with security best practices.
  • OWASP Mobile Top Ten: A list of the most critical mobile security risks, highlighting threats such as insecure data storage and insufficient cryptography, guiding developers on how to mitigate them.
  • OWASP MASWE (Mobile Application Security Weakness Enumeration): This comprehensive guide focuses on methodologies for security testing mobile apps, providing practical tools for testers and developers.

Deep dive

OWASP, the organization

OWASP is an internationally recognized non-profit organization dedicated to improving software security through open-source projects, tools, frameworks, and community-driven research.

Established in 2001, OWASP's mission is to empower developers, testers, and organizations with the knowledge and tools necessary to secure software systems. It operates with a strong focus on openness, providing free resources and fostering a global community of security professionals.

OWASP's projects include the OWASP Top 10, a widely adopted list of the most critical security risks for web apps, and specialized security frameworks for mobile apps like MASVS. OWASP also offers guidance on secure coding, vulnerability testing, and threat mitigation through detailed publications and hands-on tools.

The OWASP MASVS

To establish security benchmarks for mobile apps and provide both developers and security professionals with a set of well-defined security requirements, OWASP designed the Mobile Application Security Verification Standard (MASVS). It supports secure-by-design principles, helping organizations mitigate risks throughout the mobile development lifecycle.

Use cases

  • Developers: To integrate security into mobile app development from the start, ensuring compliance with security best practices.
  • Penetration testers: To perform mobile security assessments and verify that apps meet required security standards.
  • Organizations: To set security requirements for mobile apps developed internally or by third parties, ensuring a consistent security posture.

The MASVS can be combined with the Mobile Application Security Testing Guide (MASTG) to provide detailed guidance on how to test each security requirement effectively.

The OWASP Mobile Top Ten

A list of the most critical security risks specific to mobile apps, the OWASP Mobile Top Ten helps developers identify prevalent threats when building secure mobile apps. It aims to raise awareness and guide developers, security professionals, and testers on common vulnerabilities that can compromise mobile apps.

The list is updated periodically based on real-world data, threat trends, and feedback from the cybersecurity community. It follows a methodology that includes:

  1. Threat modeling: Assessing risks based on the app’s functionality, platform, and the data it processes.
  2. Data collection: Using insights from security incidents, vulnerability testing reports, and expert contributions to identify prevalent issues.
  3. Categorization of risks: Grouping vulnerabilities by their severity and impact on app security.

Each listed risk includes examples, potential attack scenarios, and mitigations, ensuring it serves as a practical guide for developers and security analysts.

Use cases

  • Developers and architects: To identify critical security risks early and incorporate mitigations during the design and development phases.
  • Security testers and auditors: To evaluate and test mobile applications against known security risks.
  • Organizations: To set security baselines and requirements for mobile app development, both in-house and through third-party vendors.

The OWASP MASWE

The OWASP Mobile Application Security Weakness Enumeration (MASWE) is a specialized framework that supports enterprises and developers in setting and managing mobile security requirements. It aligns security goals with technical security standards, ensuring that organizations and individual developers maintain a high level of mobile app security across the entire development lifecycle.

While it is especially relevant for larger organizations with complex security requirements, it can be valuable for anyone developing mobile apps who wants to adopt strong security practices, regardless of your organization’s size.

The OWASP MASWE methodology integrates security practices into a range of development and business processes:

  1. Security maturity models: It helps you assess and enhance your mobile security programs over time, identifying gaps and setting achievable security goals.
  2. Alignment with MASVS: MASWE builds on the OWASP MASVS framework by incorporating its technical standards and adapting them to your development environment.
  3. Risk management: You can use MASWE to map technical risks (e.g., mobile vulnerabilities) to broader risks, supporting informed decision-making.
  4. Security governance: MASWE promotes governance by defining processes for risk assessments, continuous monitoring, and compliance validation across internal and third-party apps.

Use cases

  • Enterprises: To set comprehensive security policies for mobile apps developed in-house or by third-party vendors, ensuring consistency and control across multiple applications.
  • Security auditors: To verify that mobile apps comply with both technical (MASVS) and organizational security requirements.
  • Developers and security teams: To align coding practices with established security goals and facilitate seamless security audits.

The OWASP MASTG

The OWASP Mobile Application Security Testing Guide (MASTG) is a comprehensive framework that helps developers, security professionals, and testers to evaluate and ensure mobile app security. It has detailed, actionable test cases and methodologies that align with the high-level requirements outlined in the OWASP MASVS, bridging the gap between theoretical security standards and practical testing procedures.

Whether you’re involved in mobile app development or security testing, MASTG helps your organization integrate robust security practices throughout the software development lifecycle.

The OWASP MASTG methodology integrates into various stages of mobile development and security processes:

  1. Comprehensive testing guidelines: MASTG offers extensive testing scenarios that include client-side, network, and server-side assessments. This helps testers identify vulnerabilities like insecure data storage, weak authentication, and cryptographic issues.
  2. Alignment with MASVS: MASTG serves as a practical companion to MASVS, providing detailed instructions on how to test the security requirements outlined in MASVS, ensuring that each standard is verifiable with specific test cases.
  3. Practical, real-world test cases: The guide includes hands-on examples and clear explanations of how testers can execute security tests, helping you understand how to replicate real-world attack vectors and identify security weaknesses.
  4. Support for continuous integration: You can integrate MASTG into CI/CD pipelines to ensure continuous security validation as part of the development process, promoting a DevSecOps approach.

Use cases

  • Security testers and auditors: To conduct thorough assessments and verify that mobile apps meet MASVS requirements and best practices.
  • Developers: To follow detailed test procedures that enhance secure coding practices and ensure vulnerabilities are addressed before deployment.
  • Organizations: To implement consistent and repeatable security testing procedures across multiple mobile apps, ensuring that security measures are standardized and effective.

By using MASTG in combination with MASVS and MASWE, you can create a holistic mobile security strategy. MASTG gives you the tactical testing framework that supports the broader strategic objectives defined by MASVS and governance structures established through MASWE. This approach ensures your mobile apps are properly secured and you can manage risks effectively.

How to use MASVS, MASTG, Top Ten, and MASWE together

Using OWASP’s MASVS, MASTG, Mobile Top Ten, and MASWE frameworks together provides a comprehensive, multi-layered approach to mobile app security by combining technical security requirements, best practices, and governance policies. Here’s how they work cohesively:

Foundation: MASVS (Mobile Application Security Verification Standard)

  • Use MASVS as the baseline technical standard to define mobile security requirements across all development stages.
  • Teams can perform assessments based on MASVS levels (e.g., Level 1 for basic security and Level 2 for higher-security apps like fintech).
  • Integrate MASVS requirements into the development lifecycle to validate secure coding practices and perform periodic security audits.
  • Use MASTG to provide practical, low-level test cases for verifying that you meet MASVS requirements.

Guidance: Mobile Top Ten

  • Developers and security professionals map the risks highlighted in Top Ten to MASVS requirements, ensuring that high-priority threats are addressed.
  • The Top Ten can serve as an awareness tool to prioritize the most relevant threats during the development and testing processes.
  • You can use MASTG for detailed testing methodologies that align with the threats that Mobile Top Ten highlights.

Governance: MASWE

  • MASWE helps you align your organization’s governance with MASVS requirements and supports setting up policies, processes, and training for mobile security management.
  • It helps enterprises and individual developers coordinate testing strategies and compliance across multiple mobile apps, ensuring alignment with both MASVS standards and real-world threats from the Mobile Top Ten.
  • MASWE bridges the gap between the high-level MASVS controls and the low-level tests in MASTG to help make your testing strategies more structured and detailed.
  • MASWE ensures you’re ready by embedding mobile security into larger risk management frameworks and enabling continuous monitoring.

Seamless integration across the lifecycle

  • Design phase: Use MASWE to set organization-level security goals and governance policies. Apply MASVS to design secure mobile app architectures with the Mobile Top Ten risks. Then integrate MASTG guidance for designing testable security measures.
  • Development and testing phase: Developers integrate MASVS requirements into their code, and testers validate security by checking for vulnerabilities mentioned in the Top Ten. MASTG provides them test cases to ensure thorough verification of implemented security measures.
  • Deployment and maintenance phase: MASWE ensures ongoing monitoring and policy enforcement, aligning organizational goals with evolving threats.

Examples

  1. E-commerce app development: Developers use the OWASP MASVS to embed secure payment processing and encryption for customer data storage from the outset. They rely on OWASP's Mobile Top Ten to prioritize risks like weak authentication or insecure data storage, addressing vulnerabilities that could expose sensitive information during transactions. The MASWE framework helps the organization manage third-party payment gateway integrations and implement governance policies to monitor compliance after launch. Testers simulate potential attacks, including attempted SQL injection during checkout and session hijacking, ensuring that the app remains resilient against fraud.
  2. Healthcare mobile app development: When developing a healthcare app, the development team integrates MASVS guidelines to secure personal health information (PHI) through data encryption and two-factor authentication. They use Mobile Top Ten to guard against risks like insecure communication channels or weak cryptographic practices that could endanger medical records, and MASWE ensures compliance with industry regulations like HIPAA. Take the German data security requirements for digital health apps that put the digital health app providers on the clock to implement app hardening and other security measures by January 1, 2025.
  3. Retail loyalty program app: Developers adopt the MASVS framework to protect user accounts and reward points, ensuring secure authentication mechanisms. OWASP’s Mobile Top Ten guides the team in mitigating vulnerabilities like weak authentication to prevent account takeovers and fraud. MASWE establishes governance practices that include regular security audits and collaborations with third-party vendors for promotions. Simulated attacks verify account security measures to safeguard user data and loyalty rewards from unauthorized access.
  4. Fintech app development: Developers use MASVS to ensure robust user authentication, transaction encryption, and protection against reverse engineering. They apply OWASP’s Mobile Top Ten to test the app’s resilience against threats like man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks during financial transactions. MASWE aligns enterprise-wide security policies with regulatory requirements, ensuring that the app adheres to both internal security goals and industry standards. Through coordinated governance and security validation, the app maintains compliance and mitigates evolving threats.

History

Mark Curphey founded OWASP in 2001 as an open-source initiative to document and address common web app security vulnerabilities on a collaborative platform. It provided free and practical resources, guidelines, and tools to developers, security professionals, and organizations. Over time, OWASP became a global standard for cybersecurity.

Since its inception, OWASP has grown from a basic list of vulnerabilities to include more sophisticated tools and frameworks, like OWASP ASVS (Application Security Verification Standard) for web app verification. It moved from reactive, vulnerability-specific mitigation to proactive security-by-design approaches across software development lifecycles. In 2019, OWASP released API Security Top Ten to address the security challenges posed by APIs.

Future

With the rise of cloud-native apps, IoT devices, artificial intelligence (AI), and API-based architectures, OWASP has expanded its scope to cover these new attack vectors. An important development has been the ongoing evolution of frameworks, with the OWASP MASVS continuing to adapt to emerging threats and best practices. This progression encouraged the adoption of MASWE, strengthening security practices in mobile app development.

Today, OWASP plays a key role in educating about cybersecurity through its global chapters, conferences, and open-source resources. Its relevance is also bolstered by regulatory changes like the EU's GDPR, California’s CCPA, and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, which mandate stricter data security practices. Organizations increasingly rely on OWASP standards to meet these compliance requirements.

Looking ahead, OWASP is expected to play a crucial role in addressing emerging challenges, including AI-powered cyberattacks, quantum computing risks, and the need for zero-trust architectures, ensuring its place at the forefront of cybersecurity for years to come.

Sources

  1. https://owasp.org/API-Security/editions/2023/en/0x03-introduction/
  2. https://cloud.google.com/api-keys/docs/overview
  3. https://about.gitlab.com/topics/devsecops/sast-vs-dast/
  4. https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-security
  5. https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-api-security
  6. https://www.akamai.com/blog/security/rest-api-security-best-practices
  7. https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/api-keys-best-practices
  8. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/secretsmanager/latest/userguide/intro.html
  9. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/13/elon-musk-owned-twitter-files-data-scraping-lawsuit-against-unknowns.html
  10. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/t-mobile-hacked-to-steal-data-of-37-million-accounts-in-api-data-breach/
  11. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/about-dma_en
  12. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9777v4m8zdo

 

 

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