Web Application Security

Course Overview

This is the course to take if you have to defend web applications! The quantity and importance of data entrusted to web applications is growing, and defenders need to learn how to secure them. Traditional network defenses, such as firewalls, fail to secure web applications. DEV522 covers the OWASP Top 10 Risks and will help you better understand web application vulnerabilities, thus enabling you to properly defend your organization’s web assets. Mitigation strategies from an infrastructure, architecture, and coding perspective will be discussed alongside real-world applications that have been proven to work. The testing aspect of vulnerabilities will also be covered so that you can ensure your application is tested for the vulnerabilities discussed in class. To maximize the benefit for a wider range of audiences, the discussions in this course will be programming language agnostic. Focus will be maintained on security strategies rather than coding-level implementation.


Course Details

The topics that will be covered include:

Infrastructure security

Server configuration

Authentication mechanisms

Application language configuration

Application coding errors like SQL injection and cross-site scripting

Cross-site request forging

Authentication bypass

Web services and related flaws

Web 2.0 and its use of web services

XPATH and XQUERY languages and injection

Business logic flaws

Protective HTTP headers


Prerequisites

This class requires a basic understanding of web application technology and concepts such as HTML and JavaScript.