Category:OWASP WebGoat Project

WebGoat is a fully-fledged J2EE web application maintained by OWASP designed to teach web application security lessons. In each lesson, users must demonstrate their understanding of a security issue by exploiting a real vulnerability in the WebGoat application. For example, in one of the lessons the user must use SQL injection to steal fake credit card numbers. The application is a realistic teaching environment, providing users with hints and code to further explain the lesson.

Why the name WebGoat? Developers should not feel bad about not knowing security. Even the best programmers make security errors. What they need is a scapegoat, right? Just blame it on the Goat!

Goals

Web application security is difficult to learn and practice. Very few people have full blown web applications like online book stores or online banks that can be used to search for vulnerabilities. In addition, security professionals frequently need to test tools against a known vulnerable platform to ensure they perform as advertised. All of this needs to happen in a safe and legal environment. Even if your intentions are good, we believe you should never attempt to find vulnerabilities without permission.

The primary goal of the WebGoat project is simple: create a de-facto interactive teaching environment for web application security. In the future, the project team hopes to extend WebGoat into becoming a security benchmarking platform and a Java-based Web site Honeypot.

Download

You can download WebGoat from the OWASP Download page. There are versions with and without Java, and installation only requires unzipping the download and running start script. For convenience, a ready-to-deploy WAR file is also made available to drop right into your application server.

Overview

WebGoat is written in Java and therefore installs on any platform with a Java virtual machine. There are automated installers for Linux, OS X Tiger and Windows. Current lessons include:

• Cross Site Scripting
• SQL Injection
• Thread Safety
• Hidden Form Field Manipulation
• Parameter Manipulation
• Weak Session Cookies
• Fail Open Authentication
• Dangers of HTML Comments
• Web Services
• Blind SQL Injection
• Numeric SQL Injection
• String SQL Injection
• Weak Session Identifier
• Web Services
• Muli-stage Basic Authentication exploitation
• Summary report card for multi-user environment
• ... and many more!

Click here to view the screenshots!

Newest Release

OWASP is pleased to announce the release of WebGoat 4.0. OWASP would like to thank Laurence Casey, Jeremy Ferragamo, Alex Smolen, Rogan Dawes, Chuck Willis and the many people who have sent comments and suggestions.

New Key Features

The new key features of WebGoat 4.0 include:

• New feature of 4.0 [1]
• New feature of 4.0 [2]
• New feature of 4.0 [3]

Key features added in recent versions include:

• Runs on Linux and OSX 10.4
• WebGoat is now current in CVS
• Improved ant build process and added Unix support
• Infrastructure changes to support multi-stage lessons
• Eclipse development release
• Minor screen improvements
• Web services lessons
• Blind SQL lesson
• Weak session identifier lesson
• Split SQL lesson into numeric and string SQL lessons
• Added parameterized query stage to SQL lessons
• Additional stage for basic authentication lesson
• Summary report card for multi-user environment

Project Contributors

The WebGoat project was conceived by Jeff Williams, who developed the initial version. Bruce Mayhew now leads the project. The WebGoat framework is extremely easy to extend with additional lessons. We are actively seeking developers to add new lessons. Please contact Bruce or send a message to the owasp-webgoat mailing list. Thanks!

Project Sponsors

The WebGoat project is sponsored by Aspect Security.

Feedback and Participation

We hope you find WebGoat useful. Please contribute to the project by sending your comments, questions, and suggestions to the WebGoat mailing list. Thanks!