Secure Coding Practices Questions Medium
There are several common vulnerabilities in software development that can pose security risks. Some of the most prevalent vulnerabilities include:
1. Injection attacks: These occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query, leading to unintended execution of malicious code. Examples include SQL injection, OS command injection, and LDAP injection.
2. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): XSS vulnerabilities allow attackers to inject malicious scripts into web pages viewed by other users. This can lead to session hijacking, defacement, or theft of sensitive information.
3. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): CSRF attacks trick users into performing unwanted actions on a website without their knowledge or consent. This can lead to unauthorized changes, data manipulation, or account compromise.
4. Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR): IDOR vulnerabilities occur when an application exposes internal implementation details, such as database keys or file paths, allowing attackers to access unauthorized resources.
5. Security misconfigurations: These vulnerabilities arise from insecure default configurations, incomplete or improper configurations, or the presence of unnecessary features or services. Attackers can exploit these misconfigurations to gain unauthorized access or perform other malicious activities.
6. Broken authentication and session management: Weaknesses in authentication mechanisms, such as weak passwords, session fixation, or session hijacking, can allow attackers to impersonate legitimate users and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data or functionality.
7. Insecure deserialization: Deserialization vulnerabilities can be exploited to execute arbitrary code, perform remote code execution, or carry out denial-of-service attacks by manipulating serialized objects.
8. Buffer overflows: These occur when a program writes more data into a buffer than it can hold, leading to memory corruption and potential execution of malicious code.
9. Unvalidated input: Failure to properly validate and sanitize user input can result in various vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, XSS, and command injection.
10. Insecure cryptographic implementations: Weak or flawed cryptographic algorithms, improper key management, or insecure random number generation can undermine the security of sensitive data and communications.
To mitigate these vulnerabilities, secure coding practices should be followed, such as input validation, output encoding, proper authentication and authorization mechanisms, secure configuration management, and regular security testing and code reviews.