Category:OWASP WebGoat Project

Volunteers

The WebGoat project is run by Bruce Mayhew. He can be contacted at webgoat AT owasp.org. WebGoat distributions are currently maintained on SourceForge and Google. The WebGoat framework makes it extremely easy to add additional lessons. We are actively seeking developers to add new lessons as new web technologies emerge. If you are interested in volunteering for the project, or have a comment, question, or suggestion, please join the WebGoat mailing list.

Thanks to Ounce Labs for allowing me time to work on and run the WebGoat project during my day job!

The project's overall goal is to...

 Be the defacto standard web application security training environment

In the near term, we are focused on the following tactical goals...

1. Demonstrate most common web application security vulnerabilities
2. Add educational support for secure coding practices
3. Enhance enterprise lesson tracking
4. Attract more contributions of lessons
5. Revisit existing lesson base to standardize lesson theme.
6. Increase ease-of-use and expand user base

Here are the current tasks defined to help us achieve these goals

Architectural

• Replace basic authentication with forms based authentication
• Rewrite all lessons to follow common theme using common database
• Rewrite user administration to allow better user management (non-hackable)
• Fix Logoff
• Defuse all lessons to disallow inadvertent harm to user's OS

General

• General security cleanup. Remove exploits that are not lesson specific
• Remove non working lessons

New Lessons

• Server side forward allows access to WEB-INF resources
• Account enumeration using webscarab
• SQLException lesson - could tie into overall error handling
• XML attacks - Entity recursion, ...

For more information contact Bruce Mayhew at webgoat at owasp dot org

Involvement in the development and promotion of WebGoat is actively encouraged! You do not have to be a security expert in order to contribute.

Previous Releases

You can download WebGoat version 5.2 and older from the OWASP Source Code Center at Sourceforge. There are versions with and without Java, and installation only requires unzipping the download and running a start script. For convenience, a ready-to-deploy WAR file is also made available to drop right into your J2EE application server.

WebGoat 5.2 Standard

This release is a download, unzip, and click-to-run release. It comes with the Java Runtime Environment and a configured Tomcat 5.5 server.

   * Double-click on webgoat.bat - a Tomcat command window starts
   * Browse to http://localhost/WebGoat/attack

WebGoat 5.2 Developer

Note: This release is intended to provide an environment for working on the WebGoat labs. If you would like to develop lessons, synch to the baseline at Google code.

The developer release includes the standard release with the addition of a configured eclipse environment. The developer release is also a download, unzip, and click-to-run release. It works exactly the same as the standard release if you only wish to explore the lessons. However, if you want to perform the labs or use WebGoat in the classroom, use the eclipse.bat to start up a preconfigured WebGoat environment. Detailed instructions are include at the top of the _HOW TO create the WebGoat workspace.txt_ file.

   * Extract the Eclipse-Workspace.zip file to the working directory
   * Double-click the eclipse.bat file
   * In the Eclipse package explorer (top right), right click the WebGoat project and refresh
   * In the Eclipse package explorer (top right), right click the Servers project and refresh
   * In the Eclipse servers view (bottom), right click LocalHost server and start
   * Browse to http://localhost/WebGoat/attack
   * Any changes made to the source will automatically compile and redeploy when saved

Please send all comments to Bruce Mayhew at webgoat AT owasp.org regarding this release.

Future Development

WebGoat has been fairly stable for a few years. The latest stable release as of Oct 7, 2013 is 5.4, and the development for 6.0 is underway at | the WebGoat Google repo. There are some issues on the WebGoat issues page that require fixing, any help there would be appreciated.

Going forward WebGoat should take advantage of the training material provided at OWASP and incorporate that material into the lesson plans. WebGoat has been useful in educating security folks in the type of attacks and how they could be exploited. WebGoat should start focusing on educating the security staff and developers on potential mitigation strategies. I would also like to see an expansion of the report card feature and the enterprise architecture used for tracking the lessons completed. WebGoat could be used in organizations as a introduction to secure coding practices.

Check out the project roadmap and find some tasks that you can help with right away.