Secure Web Application Engineering: OWASP & CWE in Practice

• Two days of lecture, code analysis and follow-along demonstrations.
• OWASP Top 10:2025 and CWE Top 25:2025 used to communicate and prioritize risk.
• Examples span C#/ASP.NET Core, Java/Spring and Python/Flask - no single language is required.
• Covers the full arc: secure design, identity, access control, input handling, dependencies,
• configuration, integrity, logging and incident-ready engineering.

• No prior application-security, penetration-testing or secure-coding experience is required.
• Basic familiarity with web applications: browser-to-server requests, APIs, databases,
• authentication and sessions.
• Familiarity with at least one server-side language is useful; participants are not expected to
• write production code in class.
• A general understanding of software-development and deployment workflows is recommended.
• No special tooling is required for the standard lecture and demonstration delivery.

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• connect attacker behavior to concrete defenses at each trust boundary
• use OWASP Top 10:2025 and CWE Top 25:2025 to communicate and prioritize risk
• run a threat-modeling workflow using STRIDE, attack-surface and data-flow analysis
• classify sensitive data and apply encryption at rest and in transit correctly
• implement secure authentication, MFA, session handling and anti-automation controls
• prevent broken access control, IDOR, forceful browsing and cross-site request forgery
• defend against SQL injection, command injection, XSS, path traversal and SSRF
• harden framework configuration and apply security headers and container controls
• manage dependency and supply-chain risk with SCA, SBOMs and advisory feeds
• design security logging and alerting that supports detection, response and forensics

• Day One: Foundations, Design, Identity and Input Security
• Module 1. Application Security Context and Ethical Bug Hunting
  • Security terminology, the exploit lifecycle, remote code execution, web shells and supply-chain attacks.
  • Current breach patterns: vulnerability exploitation, credential misuse, ransomware and the human element.
  • Developer lessons from real incidents, including the MOVEit Transfer compromise.
  • Authorization, scope, privacy, professional conduct and safe testing practice.
• Module 2. Fingerprinting and Risk Prioritization
  • How attackers identify platforms, versions, configurations and database technologies.
  • Banner grabbing, injection probing, timing analysis, error analysis and metadata discovery.
  • Information-exposure risk, practical mitigations, and prioritizing with OWASP and CWE.
• Module 3. Secure Design and Threat Modeling
  • Security across the development lifecycle; n-tier architecture and framework security features.
  • Threat-modeling workflow and STRIDE analysis.
  • Attack-surface analysis, trust boundaries, defense in depth, secure defaults and least privilege.
  • Demonstration: threat modeling a representative web application.
• Module 4. Asset Management, Data Protection and Validation
  • Asset discovery, data classification and regulatory considerations.
  • Cryptographic failures, hard-coded credentials, TLS configuration and certificate management.
  • Key and secret management; boundary validation and framework input/output validation patterns.
• Module 5. Authentication and Session Management
  • Secure authentication patterns, password storage, hashing and account recovery.
  • Multi-factor authentication, TOTP and WebAuthn/FIDO2.
  • Secure cookies, session timeout, rotation and fixation prevention; rate limiting and lockout.
• Module 6. Access Control and Authorization
  • Broken, missing and incorrect authorization; role-based and attribute-based patterns.
  • Forceful browsing, exposed administrative interfaces, backup files and test environments.
  • Insecure direct object references across pages, APIs, documents and file paths.
  • Cross-site request forgery flows, framework defenses and privilege-escalation prevention.
• Module 7. Injection, Input Validation and Output Encoding
  • SQL injection with parameterized query and ORM defenses; OS command injection.
  • Reflected, stored and DOM-based XSS; contextual encoding and Content Security Policy.
  • Path traversal and server-side request forgery.
  • Positive validation, encodings, rich text, file uploads and well-vetted regular expressions.
• Day Two: Hardening, Supply Chain, Runtime Defense and Emerging Risk
• Module 8. Memory Safety, Resource Management and Error Handling
  • Out-of-bounds access, buffer weaknesses, integer overflow and null-pointer risk.
  • Resource limits and protection against uncontrolled resource consumption.
  • Exception handling, safe user-facing errors and preventing sensitive-information exposure.
• Module 9. Security Configuration and Application Hardening
  • Security misconfiguration and the secure-defaults principle.
  • Framework hardening examples for Spring Boot and Flask; security headers.
  • Container security scanning, resource controls and reviewable configuration management.
• Module 10. Dependency and Software Supply-Chain Security
  • Supply-chain failures and the dependency-management lifecycle.
  • Software composition analysis and software bills of materials.
  • CVE, NVD, GitHub Security Advisories, OSV and commercial feeds; patch and rollback paths.
• Module 11. Software and Data Integrity
  • Integrity failures in code, updates, plugins, CI/CD pipelines and trusted data flows.
  • Code-injection risk from dynamic evaluation, and safer alternatives.
  • Insecure deserialization, constrained data binding and XML external entity risk.
• Module 12. Security Logging, Alerting and Runtime Response
  • Logging and alerting failures and their impact on detection, response and forensics.
  • What to capture: validation and authentication failures, authorization denials, unusual access.
  • Actionable alerts with identity, target, outcome, risk and correlation context.
  • Application-layer response: step-up authentication, session revocation, throttling and lockout.
• Module 13. Tools, Compliance and Continuous Improvement
  • Framework-specific security responsibilities and implementation review.
  • Static analysis, dynamic testing, dependency scanning, vulnerability scanning and penetration testing.
  • Using OWASP, CWE, CVE, NIST and vendor advisories to keep practice current.
• Module 14. Emerging Security Technologies (optional)
  • Quantum-computing timelines and risk to current public-key cryptography.
  • Post-quantum cryptography, NIST standards, cryptographic inventory and phased migration.
  • AI-assisted scanning, code review and incident response, and the limits of each.