When it comes to IT security, your whole organization needs to be protected from threats that can hinder business operations. Your physical devices need to be safeguarded, your sensitive online data needs to be under lock and key, and your network infrastructure needs to be strong. Your web applications shouldn’t be left out from this list of components that need to be protected.
Vulnerabilities Specific to Web Applications
There are several known vulnerabilities that can be exploited in web applications to compromise core security services (confidentiality, authentication, and availability). The top 10 list of vulnerabilities within web applications are as follows: unvalidated input, broken authentication and session management, broken access control, buffer overflows, cross site scripting flaws, insecure storage, injection flaws, improper error handling, insecure configuration management, and denial of service. Having these vulnerabilities in mind helps focus on security analysis through all stages of application development.
Through their properties, web-based enterprise applications introduce unique security challenges to IT departments within companies. While some of the same properties can be found in other applications, too, the combination of all these is quite specific to enterprise web applications. Some of these properties include distributed n-tiered architecture, transparency, scalability, remote access, real-time operation, and data transfer over the web.
Related: What You Should be Looking for in a Next-Generation Firewall
These properties can affect a business’ core security services on many levels. For instance, confidentiality goes hand in hand with data transfer over the web. Concurrent access has critical implications from an integrity perspective. Authentication is crucial because of remote access and can be compromised due to poor input validation. Lastly, availability is an important security concern in enterprise web application and can be affected by failure handling and real-time operations.
Risks of Poor Web Application Security
Since these applications often consist of a collection of software components from different vendors, vulnerabilities present in each component can compromise the security of the application as a whole. On average, open-source and third-party vendors introduce 24 vulnerabilities into enterprise web applications. This finding is based on an analysis of 5,300 enterprise web applications uploaded over a two month period to a newly released software composition analysis service. The weakest link principle states a system is only as secure as its weakest link, and enterprise web applications have many places that may contain weak links.
The data suggests almost all applications have at least one critical vulnerability caused by reusable components. If vulnerabilities within enterprise web applications aren’t addressed, they can expose companies to significant cyber threats, such as data breaches, denial of service attacks, and malware injections. If reusable components are one of the main causes of application vulnerabilities, companies can largely reduce the associated risks by continuously auditing their application portfolios for the presence of risky components.
Enterprise web applications play a vital role within an organization. They are required every day, and as an essential tool, they should be heavily protected from threats. Their vulnerabilities present unique security challenges that can expose a business to damage. Web application security is needed, so your applications don’t become your weakest link.
