OWASP Categories

The OWASP Folksonomy Approach to Organizing Application Security

There are many different ways of organizing all the different aspects of application security. Attempts to force these topics into a strict taxonomy have failed because there are too many dimensions to the problem. Organizing the information by a single factor -- the type of programming flaw, for example -- confuses and eliminates all the useful information from the other dimensions.

At OWASP, we have adopted the folksonomy tagging approach to solving this problem. We simply tag our articles with a number of different categories. You can use these category to help get different views into the complex, interconnected set of topics that is application security.

Each article is tagged with as many of the following tags as reasonably apply:

Type of Article	Principle, Threat, Attack, Vulnerability, Countermeasure, Code Snippet, How To, Activity
Level of Abstraction	Implementation, Design, Architecture, Business
Countermeasures	Authentication, Session Management, Access Control, Validation, Encoding, Error Handling, Logging, Encryption, Quotas
Likelihood Factors	Attractiveness, Tools Required, Expertise Required
Business Impact Factors	Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Accountability, Non-Repudiation
Application Platforms	Java, .NET, PHP, C/C++
Software Lifecycle Activites	Planning, Requirements, Architecture, Design, Implementation, Test, Deployment, Operation, Maintenance
Application Security Activites	Threat Modeling, Security Architecture, Security Requirements, Secure Coding, Penetration Testing, Code Review, Secure Deployment
Vulnerability Analysis Technique	Vulnerability Scanning, Penetration Testing, Static Analysis, Code Review
Other Application Security Categories	Role, Tool