An essential part of an effective software security process is being familiar with software vulnerabilities, which are flaws or weaknesses in your code. Often, testing and manual code reviews are unable to identify every single vulnerability, which can impact the performance and security of your software. For that reason, it is important to have a working understanding of software vulnerabilities as it will enable you to more effectively manage potential security threats.
The top 10 most common security vulnerabilities are as follows:
- Insufficient Logging and Monitoring: Insufficient logging and monitoring process are dangerous as they leave your data vulnerable to tampering, extraction, or even destruction.
- Injection Flaws: Injection flaws can trick the targeted system into executing unintended commands as well as provide untrustworthy agents access to protected data.
- Sensitive Data Exposure: Sensitive data—which includes addresses, passwords and account numbers—must be adequately protected against human-error and security breaches to avoid potential exposures.
- Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities: Components—which are made up of libraries, frameworks and other software modules—are often run on the same privileges as your application. Which means if a component is vulnerable, those weaknesses can be exploited in an effort to access your application.
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Flaws: Cross-site scripting flaws can be exploited by untrustworthy agents in an effort to execute their own scripts in your system.
- Broken Authentication: If authentication and session management application functions are implemented incorrectly, a software vulnerability can be created.
- Broken Access Control: If user restrictions are broken, it can create a software vulnerability that can be exploited.
- XML External Entities (XXE): In order to properly understand an XML data, an XML parser is necessary. However, if the parser is poorly configured and the XML input that contains a reference to an external entity, it can provide a flaw that an untrustworthy agent can exploit.
- Security Misconfiguration: Security misconfigurations are often brought upon for numerous reasons, including: insecure default configurations, incomplete or impromptu configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers and wordy error messages that contain sensitive information.
- Insecure Deserialization: Deserialization flaws often result in remote code executions, which enables untrustworthy agents to perform replay, injection and privilege escalation attacks.
Prevent Software Vulnerabilities
In order to efficiently and effectively prevent software vulnerabilities, we recommend the following best practices:
- Establish software design requirements.
- Use a coding standard.
- Test your software.
To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/common-software-vulnerabilities
