Category:OWASP WebGoat Project

WebGoat is a deliberately insecure 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! To get started, read the WebGoat User and Install Guide.

Goals
Web application security is difficult to learn and practice. Not many people have full blown web applications like online book stores or online banks that can be used to scan for vulnerabilities. In addition, security professionals frequently need to test tools against a platform known to be vulnerable to ensure that 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.

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

Download
You can download WebGoat 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.

Overview
WebGoat is written in Java and therefore installs on any platform with a Java virtual machine. There are installation programs for Linux, OS X Tiger and Windows. Once deployed, the user can go through the lessons and track their progress with the scorecard. There are currently over 30 lessons, including those dealing with the following issues:


 * Cross Site Scripting
 * Access Control
 * Thread Safety
 * Hidden Form Field Manipulation
 * Parameter Manipulation
 * Weak Session Cookies
 * Blind SQL Injection
 * Numeric SQL Injection
 * String SQL Injection
 * Web Services
 * Fail Open Authentication
 * Dangers of HTML Comments
 * ... and many more!

For more details, please see the WebGoat User and Install Guide.

Newest Release
WebGoat 4.0

Thursday, May 25th, OWASP released WebGoat 4.0. Special thanks go to the many people who have sent comments and suggestions and those who have put in the effort to contribute their time to this release like: David Anderson, Laurence Casey, Eric Sheridan, Arshan Dabirsiaghi, and Robert Sullivan.

New Key Features
The new key features of WebGoat 4.0 include:
 * Complete visual overhaul using CSS
 * New lesson architecture
 * Conversion to JSPs
 * New lessons including 3 multi-stage labs
 * [Eclipse] developer environment using WTP
 * Goat Hills Financials HR management system

Project Contributors
The WebGoat project was conceived by Jeff Williams, who developed the initial version. Bruce Mayhew now leads the project. WebGoat is currently maintained on [SourceForge]. 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].

Project Sponsors
The WebGoat project is sponsored by http://www.owasp.org/docroot/owasp/img/members/aspect_logo.gif