Builders

OWASP Builders
Want to contribute to the OWASP Builders Community? Add your info and send an email to [mailto:john.wilander@owasp.org john.wilander@owasp.org]

Developer Outreach
Get involved in the Developer Outreach by subscribing to the ...
 * Steering List (low traffic)
 * Google Group (for discussions)

The first priority of the Builders Community is to reach out to developers and ask what application security is lacking today. An initial lightweight outreach was performed early March 2011.

Developers' Security Itches March 2011
The overall results of the initial outreach can be seen in the diagram below (categorization by John Wilander, full-text available via links below). This is a first glimpse at what developers think are the problems and challenges for application security.



Full data searchable via the online database https://www.grubba.net (account 'owasp'/'owasp') or available in a .csv file here.

"Lack of Security in Frameworks"
Here's what the developers said in the number one category "Lack of Security in Frameworks":

Question: What are your security itches?


 * NMP (not my problem), aka should be handled by the used frameworks (spring, struts, etc). [Java and C# developer, 5 years of experience]
 * The idea that you can tackle all security problems with spring security. [Java and C# developer, 5 years of experience]
 * I want more/most/all implementation-level security issues taken care of at the language and framework level. There are far too many security problems that are left to developers to understand and take care of. [Java and JavaScript developer, 15 years experience]
 * Libraries and frameworks has insecure defaults (example: JSP's c:out). Webapp frameworks doesnt keep up with the security landscape, and there are no quick fixes to add security to these. No central place for developers for different languages and frameworks, making it hard to find the good solutions (making people solve the same problems over and over, with different success rate). [Java and JavaScript developer, 6 years of experience]
 * Things I don't have control over. 3rd party DB drivers, image libraries, all kind of framework. [C# and Java developer, 10 years of experience]
 * Frameworks missing mechanisms for solving common security problems (CSRF, http-only etc.) [Java+Ruby developer, 3 years experience]
 * Lack of security support in frameworks. [Java developer, 15 years of experience]
 * Picking secure components. [Java and Scala developer, 8 years of experience]
 * Missing a lot of functionality in frameworks for handling common security issues. [Java and JavaScript developer, 10 years of experience]
 * Secure by default, i e default settings in frameworks would be nice. [Java and JavaScript developer, 10 years of experience]