Introduction

1. Introduction

Welcome to the OWASP Development Guide.

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) is a nonprofit foundation that works to improve the security of software. It is an open community dedicated to enabling organizations to conceive, develop, acquire, operate, and maintain applications that can be trusted.

Along with the OWASP Top Ten, the Developer Guide is one of the original resources published soon after the OWASP foundation was formed in 2001. Version 1.0 of the Developer Guide was released in 2002 and since then there have been various releases culminating in version 2.0 in 2005. Since then the guide has been revised extensively to bring it up to date. The latest versions are 4.x because version 3.0 was never released.

The purpose of this guide is to provide an introduction to security concepts and a handy reference for application / system developers. Generally it describes security practices using the advice given in the OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM) and describes the OWASP projects referenced in the OWASP Application Security Wayfinder project.

This guide does not seek to replicate the many excellent sources on specific security topics; it rarely tries to go into detail on a subject and instead provides links for greater depth on these security topics. Instead the content of the Developer Guide aims to be accessible, introducing practical security concepts and providing enough detail to get developers started on various OWASP tools and documents.

All of the OWASP projects and tools described in this guide are free to download and use. All OWASP projects are open source; please do get involved if you are interested in improving application security.

Audience

Developers should use this OWASP Developer Guide to help write applications that are more secure. The guide has been written by the security community to help software developers write solid, safe and secure applications. Most of the contributors to this guide are also software developers as well as security engineers, and this helps to keep the focus developer centric.

If you are in a hurry and want information on a specific subject then try the OpenCRE chat LLM for immediate answers.

What is the Developer Guide?

You can think of this guide as a cross-reference source to the many tools and documents that OWASP provide for developers.

Or you can regard the purpose of this guide as answering the question: “I am a developer and I need a reference guide to navigate the numerous security tools and security activities that I know I should be doing.

Or think of it as a collection of articles that introduce developers to the wide domain of application security.

Or you can regard this guide as a companion document to the OWASP Integration Standards project: the Application Security Wayfinder maps out the many tools, projects and documents within OWASP and the Developer Guide provides some ‘wordy’ context.

The OWASP Developer Guide is a community effort; if there is something that needs changing then submit an issue or edit on GitHub.

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