Difference between revisions of "OWASP Documentation Project Template"

The OWASP Securuty Principles

Although this is a sample template, the project is real! Please contribute to this project.'

Over the course of my career, I have come across and collected a number of security aphorisms. These aphorisms constitute the fundamental principles of information security.

None of the ideas or truths are mine, and unfortunately, I did not collect the citations. Initially, I would like to identify the correct citations for each aphorism.

Additionally, many are re-statements of the same idea; thus, the 'collection of ideas' defines a fundamental principle. As such, I would also like to reverse engineer the principles from the aphorisms where appropriate, as well.

Introduction

Inevitably applications are designed with security principles architects knew about, security folks included. However, as this project demonstrates there are far more than just a 'few' principles, most of which never make it into the design.

For example, security design happens with perhaps a handful of principles:

• Least Privilege
• Perimeter Security
• Defence in Depth

However, we regularly see designs without separation of privilege!

Think about that, most web applications today have all their eggs in a single basket. The business logic, the identities, passwords, products, policy enforcement, security rules are all found in the same application database that makes up the typical website! It is little wonder then, that attacks on the database have been so completely devastating, since there is no separation of privilege!

The aim of this project, is to identify and describe a minimum functional set of principles that must be present in a secure design.

Description

How does this move the security needle forward?

Licensing

The OWASP Security Principles are free to use. In fact it is encouraged!!!

I also strongly encourage you to participate and contribute. I have no monopoly on this knowledge; however, we all have pieces of this knowledge from our experience. Let's begin with putting our individual pieces together and make something great. Great things happen when people work together. :-)

Therefore the OWASP Security Principles are licensed under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license], so you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, and you can adapt it, and use it commercially, but all provided that you attribute the work and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

What is OWASP Security Principles Project?

The end goal is to identify, cite, and document the fundamental principles of information security. Once this is well organised, I think it would be great to publish this via OWASP Press. Of course, it will always remain freely available, and any money collected will go directly into the project to absorb costs with any remaining funds going to the OWASP Foundation.

This document should serve as a guide to technical architects and designers outlining the fundamental principles of security.

Presentation

Link to presentation

Project Leader

Dennis Groves

Related Projects

• OWASP_CISO_Survey

Quick Download

The home of the OWASP Security Principles is on GitHub. Your are encourged to fork, edit and push your changes back to the project.

• Zip File.
• tgz File.

News and Events

• [20 Nov 2013] News 2
• [30 Sep 2013] News 1

In Print

This project can be purchased as a print on demand book from Lulu.com

Classifications