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.

• This should include things which were in v1 but dropped from v2, like: OWASP-AC-003 : Authorization Parameter Manipulation, OWASP-AC-004 : Authorized pages/functions

2) Information gathering is not a set of vulnerabilities --> not in report --> new category: Passive mode
3) Business logic testing --> not in report --> Passive mode
4) Infrastructural test --> new category
5) Web Services section needs improvement
6) AJAX Testing section needs improvement
7) New category: Client side Testing. AJAX and Flash Testing

This document analyzes the OWASP Testing Guide v2 vulnerabilities and a plan for create the new v3.

The following clarifications/considerations also need to be made in preparation for v3:
1) Are "OWASP-AUTHN-001 : Authentication endpoint request should be HTTPS" and "OWASP-AUTHN-003 : Credentials transport over an encrypted channel" as they were in v1 fully covered by "OWASP-IG-005 : SSL/TLS Testing"?
2) Are "OWASP-AUTHN-009 : Password Structure" and "OWASP-AUTHN-010 : Blank Passwords" as they were in v1 fully covered by OWASP-AT-003 & OWASP-AT-001?
3) Are all 5 AUTHSM references as they were in v1 fully covered by "OWASP-SM-001 : Session Management Schema"?
4) What does "OWASP-DP-001 : Sensitive Data in HTML" fall under in v2/v3?
5) Are all the SSL Data protection references (DP-003 through DP-007) from v1 fall under "OWASP-IG-005 : SSL/TLS Testing"?
6) Is "OWASP-DS-001 : Locking Customer Accounts" a subset of AUTHN-008 in v1 or AT-006 in v2 or is it really an item on it's own?
7) Are "OWASP-EH-002 : User Error Messages" and "OWASP-EH-001 : Application Error Messages" as they were in v1 meant to fall under "OWASP-IG-004 : Analysis of Error Codes"? If so where would things like overly specific authentication errors appear in the report? (If I understand correctly Information gathering isn't going to be reported) [This would be things like errors messages which actually specify "invalid username" or "invalid password" instead of "Error: the credentials provided are invalid" or similar generic messaging.]