The OWASP Top 10:2025 names ten major classes of web application security risk, from broken access control to mishandled exceptional conditions. It is an awareness and prioritization framework—not a prediction of which flaw is most likely in your particular application or a universal remediation order. Use it to find questions your team should answer about its own architecture, assets, threats, and business impact.
What is the OWASP Top 10:2025?
Published by the OWASP Top 10 Project, the 2025 edition is “a standard awareness document for developers and web application security.” It groups common security weaknesses into ten categories, ordered by OWASP’s assessment of their importance. The project says its 2025 edition focuses on root causes where practical, while recognizing that categories can overlap.
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The ranking is a useful starting point, not a site-specific risk score. Organizations face different threat actors and business impacts, and OWASP describes its ranking system as imperfect. A lower-ranked category can therefore deserve urgent attention in an application whose architecture or data makes it especially consequential.
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What are the ten critical web application security risks?
A01: Broken Access Control
Authorization determines what an already identified user is allowed to do. OWASP puts broken access control first and defines it this way: “Access control enforces policy such that users cannot act outside of their intended permissions.” Failures include violating least privilege or deny-by-default, manipulating a URL or API request, changing an account identifier to reach someone else’s data, leaving POST, PUT, or DELETE actions unprotected, escalating privileges, tampering with tokens or cookies, and permissive CORS configuration.
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OWASP’s 2025 introduction reports a 3.73% average incidence rate for A01: the average share of applications in its tested population with one or more of the 40 CWEs mapped to the category. The A01 page separately says 100% of applications tested had some form of broken access control. These are dataset-specific measurements, not estimates that 100% of all web applications are vulnerable.
A02: Security Misconfiguration
Configuration is a security control, whether it belongs to the application, its underlying system, or a cloud service. Unnecessary features or accounts, unchanged defaults, overly informative error messages, and missing or insecure security headers are examples of misconfiguration. A repeatable hardening process helps teams apply and maintain secure settings consistently; a code change is not required for a configuration weakness to expose an application.
OWASP’s 2025 data gives A02 a 3.00% average incidence rate in its tested population. That figure describes the project’s mapped-CWE testing data, not the proportion of all applications that are misconfigured.
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A03: Software Supply Chain Failures
This category covers failures across the software supply chain, including dependencies, build systems, and software distribution. It is broader than simply using an outdated component: the concern is whether the software and processes an application relies on can be trusted. OWASP notes that testing this category is challenging, so a low presence in observed test data should not be read as evidence that the risk is minor.
A04: Cryptographic Failures
Cryptographic failures include absent or insufficient protection, exposed keys, and related mistakes that can undermine sensitive data. OWASP says data in transit should be encrypted at the transport layer. Protecting the keys and secrets that enable that protection is part of the same security problem.
OWASP’s 2025 dataset reports a 3.80% average incidence rate for A04 among tested applications, based on the project’s mapped-CWE measurements—not a universal prevalence estimate.
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A05: Injection
Injection occurs when untrusted input reaches an interpreter—such as a browser, database, or command line—and is treated as instructions rather than data. OWASP’s core guidance is: “The best means to prevent injection requires keeping data separate from commands and queries:” Prefer safe APIs and parameterized interfaces that preserve that separation. Validate input on the server as an additional control, but do not treat validation alone as a complete defense. OWASP recommends combining code review with automated testing.
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Insecure design is a weakness in the application’s security controls or assumptions at the design level. It is distinct from a deployment mistake: sound configuration cannot by itself make an inadequate design secure. Teams need to consider security requirements and controls while deciding how the application should work.
A07: Authentication Failures
Authentication is about establishing and maintaining a user’s identity; authorization is about what that identity may do. Authentication failures concern the former, while A01 concerns the latter. The distinction matters because a system can verify who someone is and still grant that person excessive permissions—or enforce permissions correctly for an identity it has not reliably established.
A08: Software or Data Integrity Failures
This category concerns trust boundaries and whether the integrity of software, code, and data artifacts is verified. It differs from confidentiality: cryptography may protect information from disclosure, while integrity controls help establish that an artifact or data has not been improperly changed.
A09: Security Logging and Alerting Failures
Security monitoring can fail when important events are not recorded, sensitive log data is exposed, logs can be manipulated through injection, alert use cases become outdated, or alert volume overwhelms responders. OWASP recommends recording security-control activity with enough context to support investigation, protecting logs, and retaining them for a period appropriate to that purpose. Alerts should point to actionable events rather than simply generate more noise.
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A10: Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions
This category covers weaknesses in how an application handles exceptional conditions. Unexpected failure paths can undermine security controls or prevent safe recovery. It is a distinct item in the 2025 list; the category label alone does not establish which failure scenarios apply to a particular application.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How do the risks differ?
The categories describe different places security can fail, so they call for different questions and controls. These distinctions are useful for diagnosis, but they are not airtight boundaries: one incident may involve more than one category.
- Identity versus permissions: A07 concerns proving and maintaining identity; A01 concerns limiting actions after identity is established.
- Design versus deployment: A06 concerns missing or inadequate controls in the design; A02 concerns insecure settings in the application, system, or cloud environment.
- First-party code versus the supply chain: A05 concerns untrusted input being interpreted as commands; A03 concerns trust in dependencies, build systems, and software distribution.
- Confidentiality versus integrity: A04 concerns cryptographic protection and related failures; A08 concerns verifying the integrity of software, code, and data artifacts.
- Prevention versus response: A01–A08 cover weaknesses in access, configuration, design, software, or data protection; A09 concerns whether security activity is recorded and turned into actionable alerts. These controls complement one another.
How should a team use the list to secure a web application?
Use the Top 10 to structure a threat- and impact-informed review, not as a checkbox that certifies an application is secure. A practical sequence is:
- Identify what matters. Map important data, user roles, application functions, integrations, and the business impact of their loss or misuse.
- Trace trust and permission boundaries. Check where identities are authenticated, where authorization is enforced, which components or artifacts are trusted, and where data crosses into interpreters or external systems.
- Review the relevant controls. Assess access policies, configuration, design assumptions, cryptographic protection, integrity checks, and the handling of exceptional conditions in the context of the application’s actual architecture.
- Test and verify. Use code review and automated testing where appropriate, including safe parameterized interfaces for injection risks. Security testing tools can help identify issues, but OWASP presents them as aids, not guarantees.
- Make monitoring actionable. Record relevant security-control activity with useful context, protect logs, and connect events to alerts responders can investigate.
- Choose remediation order by risk. Weigh the affected asset, plausible threats, exposure, and business impact alongside the OWASP categories. The category rank by itself does not decide what your organization should fix first.
OWASP’s incidence figures can help readers understand what appeared in the project’s test data, but they should not be used as prevalence estimates for all web applications or as a substitute for assessing a specific system. The 2025 project discusses test coverage and its risk-scoring formula; observed dataset metrics necessarily reflect that scope.
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