Testing for Authorization

OWASP Testing Guide v3 Table of Contents

This article is part of the OWASP Testing Guide v3. The entire OWASP Testing Guide v3 can be downloaded here.

OWASP at the moment is working at the OWASP Testing Guide v4: you can browse the Guide here

This is a draft of a section of the new Testing Guide v3

Authorization Testing

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Authorization is the concept of allowing access to resources only to those permitted to use them. Testing for Authorization means understanding how the authorization process works and using that information to circumvent the authorization mechanism.
Authorization is a process that comes after a successfull authentication, so the tester will verify this point once that he holds a valid credentials with roles and privileges assigned. During this kind of assessement should be verified if it is possible to bypass the authorization schema, find a path Traversal, or found a way to escalate the privilege the tester holds.

4.6.1 Testing for Path Traversal
First we test if it is possible to find a way to execute a path traversal and access to not authorized information

4.6.2 Testing for bypassing authorization schema
This kind of test focus on verify how the authorization schema has been impleemted for each role/privilege to access to reserved functions/resources.

4.6.3 Testing for Privilege Escalation
During this phase the tester should verify that is not possible for a user to modify his privileges/roles inside the application that could allow a privilege escalation.