OWASP Testing Guide v3 Startup

Planning the new OWASP Testing Guide v3

3rd October 2007: Startup v3
The OWASP Testing Guide v2 was a great success, with thousand download and many many Companies that have adopted it as standard for a Web Application Penetration Testing.
Now we would like to begin a new project that is based on v2 but improve it and complete it.

In the OWASP Testing Guide v2 we have split the set of tests in 8 sub-categories:

• Information Gathering
• Business logic testing
• Authentication Testing
• Session Management Testing
• Data Validation Testing
• Denial of Service Testing
• Web Services Testing
• AJAX Testing

The following are my thoughts about the new OWASP Testing Guide v3:

1) Authorization testing missing. As Jeff and Dave said many time before it's important to create a new category.
2) Information gathering is not a set of vulnerabilities. I think we can add a new category Infrastructural testing.
3) Web Services section needs improvement.
4) AJAX Testing section needs improvement.
5) New category: Client side Testing: nowadays in web 2.0 applications it's really important to test for client side vulnerabilities that can introduce new type of attacks: for example a XSS on flash movie loaded on the client (see the last work of Di Paola).

For each category we describe the v2 and the possible improvements.

Information Gathering

v2:

• Application Fingerprint
  
• Application Discovery
  
• Spidering and googling
  
• Collection of error code
  
• SSL/TLS Testing
  
• DB Listener Testing
  
• File extensions handling
  
• Old, backup and unreferenced files