Major Web Application Threats for Data Privacy & Security - Detection, Analysis and Mitigation Strategies

Abstract

In the context of information security, privacy and data security are inseparable, interdependent and complement each other. This is truer in social networking and e-commerce where user’s personal data including financial transaction data is at stake. Web application security threats have posed several challenges to ensuring data security of any web application hosted on cloud. These threats have been evolving in severity and the potential impact that it causes to service provider and the user’s personal data that it hosts. Current work is an effort to educate the readers about major vulnerabilities that exist among security threats listed as part of Open Web Application Security Project’s (OWASP) top ten web security threats. We provide detailed guidelines on how to detect, and analyse these vulnerabilities using tools such as Burp Suite. Recommendations and best practices for developing a secure development life cycle and following secure coding practices are discussed at length to empower developers to mitigate and avoid these vulnerabilities in their application at different stages of software development. This work is a timely and technically informative reminder for all the service providers to build trustable solutions for secure cloud based services and move towards trusted computing and to ensure user data’s privacy and security.