Q1 of 24 · Security
What is the OWASP Top 10 and how should a QA engineer use it?
Short answer
Short answer: The OWASP Top 10 is a ranked list of the most critical web application security risks, updated every few years by a global community of security practitioners. For QA, it is a test checklist — each category translates directly into negative test cases, boundary checks, and response validation you can add to your test plan.
Detail
The OWASP Top 10 (2021 edition) covers: Broken Access Control (A01), Cryptographic Failures (A02), Injection (A03), Insecure Design (A04), Security Misconfiguration (A05), Vulnerable and Outdated Components (A06), Identification and Authentication Failures (A07), Software and Data Integrity Failures (A08), Security Logging and Monitoring Failures (A09), and Server-Side Request Forgery (A10).
For a QA engineer, each category maps to concrete test activities:
- A01 Broken Access Control: test that User A cannot access User B's resources; test that non-admin users cannot reach admin endpoints; test that unauthenticated requests return 401, not 200.
- A03 Injection: submit SQL, command, and LDAP injection payloads in text inputs and URL parameters; assert no data leaks or stack traces in the response.
- A05 Security Misconfiguration: check response headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options), probe /debug and /admin paths, verify error messages don't contain stack traces.
- A07 Identification and Authentication Failures: test lockout after failed attempts, test session token invalidation on logout, test MFA bypass scenarios.
- A06 Vulnerable Components: this one is for SCA tooling in CI, not manual test cases.
You don't need to be a penetration tester to use the OWASP Top 10 — you need to know what each category means so you can write the defensive validation tests that verify the mitigations are working.