What Is OWASP?

OWASP, or the Open Worldwide Application Security Project, is a nonprofit foundation focused on improving the security of web applications and software. OWASP offers open-source tools, documentation, and standards that help developers and security teams identify and address application vulnerabilities. Its most widely known resource is the OWASP Top 10, a regularly updated list of the most critical web application security risks.

OWASP is a globally-based, non-profit organization that has no products to sell and no vested interest in promoting vendors or their agendas. All tools, frameworks, and documentation produced by OWASP are provided at no cost to anyone. The open nature of how OWASP works is one reason the security community places its trust in it.

OWASP offers practical, peer-reviewed information for security teams looking to identify and mitigate the most common web application vulnerabilities. Because the work done by OWASP is driven by thousands of volunteer contributors from around the world, it’s always based on what’s possible in the real world, rather than some hypothetical scenario.

Integrating security from the start demands clear benchmarks. OWASP’s Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) provides exactly that—a testable standard that defines what “secure enough” means in practice.

CISOs can use OWASP frameworks as a trusted, vendor-neutral basis for aligning their security program with recognized industry practices. It also publishes training materials and educational resources designed to improve security awareness throughout the development and IT communities. OWASP can serve as a respected, widely adopted reference point when justifying your security investment decisions to the board.

The OWASP Top 10 is the project’s most widely used resource—a ranked list of critical web application security risks compiled from vulnerability data submitted by researchers, practitioners, and organizations worldwide. The OWASP Top 10:2025 reflects the latest assessment of how attackers target modern software.

For security architects, it functions as a prioritization tool. Categories like Broken Access Control (#1 in both 2021 and 2025), Security Misconfiguration, Injection, Cryptographic Failures, and Authentication Failures map directly to areas of greatest web application exposure—guiding where security resources deliver the most impact.

For developers, the OWASP Top 10 pinpoints the most common coding vulnerabilities to eliminate: injection flaws, weak cryptography, and insecure authentication logic that persist across production environments. It also helps teams identify where disciplined development practices yield the highest security returns.

For compliance teams, the value is in alignment. Many frameworks, such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and SOC 2, reference the OWASP Top 10 as a baseline standard for web application security programs.

Web-based applications have become an increasingly attractive attack vector  enterprise environments. A 2025 cybersecurity survey found that 56% of organizations experienced a web application breach or compromise in the last 12 months; 50% were compromised the year prior. That trend is difficult to overlook.

OWASP is typically relied upon by CISOs as it offers an industry-accepted, vendor-neutral foundation for best practices in secure software development. This provides a common ground across audit, board, and third-party evaluations without any vendor bias.

For SOC teams, the advantage lies in how OWASP vulnerability categories assist detection by enabling analysts to identify and understand how attackers exploit broken access controls, injection flaws, and authentication weaknesses in real-time traffic.

At the risk leadership level, the greater advantage is having a standard approach to application security. OWASP provides the basis for a shared language among development, security, and compliance groups, allowing application security programs to scale without compromising integrity.

Is OWASP an SAST or DAST tool? This is a common question that causes some ambiguity in the cybersecurity community. OWASP is not a methodology or a security product; it’s an open standards platform, a set of guidelines that organizations use when developing their own testing methodologies, whether SAST, DAST, or something else.

That difference is important because OWASP resources can be used for all types of testing. SAST (Static Application Security Testing) tools look at source code before an application runs, and a lot of them use the OWASP Top 10 as a set of rules to pinpoint unsafe coding patterns. DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) tools check a live application from the outside and usually check their results against the same OWASP risk categories. IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing) combines both perspectives by instrumenting a running application during testing, allowing AppSec teams to see exploitable code paths in real time.

This is what makes OWASP useful for AppSec teams. It gives a consistent way to classify vulnerabilities that’s not tied to any one tool. This means that results from SAST, DAST, and IAST can all be placed within the same framework for prioritizing and fixing.

Security engineers and developers use OWASP as a resource for identifying risks. Unlike the general threat categories, OWASP identifies specific vulnerabilities that an attacker uses to gain access to information and guides how to identify those vulnerabilities before an attacker does. Its guidance covers several threat areas that can pose significant consequences:

• Broken Access Control: As OWASP’s number one-ranked risk in its Top 10:2025, broken access control occurs when a user is able to perform actions outside of their intended permissions. Attackers exploit these weaknesses to access unauthorized data, manipulate records, or escalate privileges.
• Injection attacks: These attacks occur when an untrusted input is sent to an interpreter without proper validation. While SQL injection is perhaps the best-known type of injection attack, there are others, such as OS Command Injection, LDAP Injection, etc. Each of these allows an attacker to read, modify, or delete data in a backend system.
• Cross-site scripting (XSS): XSS is a type of attack where an attacker injects malicious scripts into content that’s delivered to another user’s browser. Once an attacker successfully exploits an XSS flaw, they can hijack sessions, steal credentials, or redirect victims to malicious websites.
• Cryptographic failures: Poorly implemented or outdated encryption makes all sensitive data accessible while in transit and at rest. Cryptographic failures cover anything from poorly implemented hashing functions to improper handling of encryption keys.
• Authentication failures: Authentication flaws—in login flow, session management, or password handling—let attackers impersonate legitimate users. Unlike access control failures, which occur post-authentication, authentication failures target the verification process itself.
• Security misconfiguration: Default configurations are typically set up insecurely, exposing services, and failing to provide consistent security controls across all environments creates easily exploitable gaps. Misconfiguring a system is one of the easiest ways to introduce risk in today’s complex application stacks.
• Software supply chain failures: A relatively new entry in OWASP’s Top 10, software supply chain failures identify vulnerabilities in third-party dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, and distribution infrastructure. For developers, this indicates that risk may arise not only through code they write, but through code they consume.
• Software and data integrity failures: These occur when applications use code or data without first determining whether it has been altered or tampered with. The recent SolarWinds attack is a clear example of what can happen when integrity checks are missing from a software delivery pipeline.

Security built into the development process costs far less to fix than security bolted on after the fact. OWASP has always operated from that premise, and its resources reflect that.

The OWASP Secure Coding Practices Guide is a useful, language-independent guide for developers who want to write code that can withstand common attack patterns. It talks about input validation, output encoding, session management, access control, and cryptographic practices—all areas where small mistakes can lead to big problems.

OWASP also adds real structure to threat modeling. Before writing any production code, the OWASP Threat Modeling framework helps teams figure out what could go wrong in a system. This kind of early analysis is what keeps risk from building up sprint by sprint for development teams that are adding security to their DevSecOps workflows.

The Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM) from OWASP is another tool that security leaders can use to evaluate and improve their organization’s secure development practices over time. Instead of a list of requirements that must be met and then forgotten about, it gives teams a measurable way to move forward.

The argument is clear for security leaders. Organizations that invest in secure development practices upstream reduce the volume and severity of vulnerabilities that reach production. That translates to fewer incidents and a stronger security posture across the application layer.

The world of application security is changing faster than most security programs can keep up with. OWASP has responded by broadening its focus to include more than just traditional web vulnerabilities. It is now observing changes in architecture and behavior that are evolving the risk of modern software. For CISOs, these trends make it clear that application security is still a key part of the security posture of any business.

• API security risks: APIs are now one of the most targeted areas in business settings, with 99% of businesses reporting at least one API security incident in 2025. The OWASP API Security Top 10 talks about the specific problems with authorization, authentication, and access control that make APIs a constant weak point.
• Cloud application security: As apps move to cloud-native architectures, large-scale exposure happens when they are not set up correctly or when design choices are not safe. Security Misconfiguration went from fifth to second place in the OWASP Top 10:2025. This shows how common configuration mistakes in the cloud have become.
• Supply chain vulnerabilities: In the Top 10:2025, supply chain failures are now a separate risk category. This includes problems with third-party dependencies, CI/CD pipelines, and build infrastructure. In 2025, there were 73% more detections of malicious open source packages than in 2020. This number is still rising.
• AI-generated code risks: AI coding assistants speed up development cycles, but they also create a new kind of security debt. Researchers found that almost 20% of the package dependencies in AI-generated code point to libraries that don’t exist. This makes it possible for supply chain injection attacks to happen. AI-generated code is also 2.74 times more likely to have cross-site scripting holes than code written by people.
• Risk of open source dependencies: Most modern apps are built on a base of open source parts, and that dependency chain is becoming more and more dangerous. Attackers use a method called dependency confusion to spread malicious packages that look like real libraries through enterprise codebases very quickly.