The US National Security Agency (SANS - www.sans.org) had recently put out a list of top 25 most dangerous programming errors that could expose your applications to cyber criminals.

Most of them can be prevented by following best practices in coding and design.    Every development team should cross check their coding practices to ensure most basic of these errors are avoided.   Here is the list not in order of importance.

1. Improper Input Validation
2. Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output
3. Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure
4. Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure
5. Failure to Preserve OS Command Structure
6. Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
7. Cross-Site Request Forgery
8. Race Condition
9. Error Message Information Leak
10. Failure to Constrain Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
11. External Control of Critical State Data
12. External Control of File Name or Path
13. Untrusted Search Path
14. Failure to Control Generation of Code
15. Download of Code Without Integrity Check
16. Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
17. Improper Initialization
18. Incorrect Calculation
19. Improper Access Control
20. Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
21. Hard-Coded Password
22. Insecure Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
23. Use of Insufficiently Random Values
24. Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
25. Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security

Source : SANS Institute, http://www.sans.org/top25errors/

Tags: programming, security

This entry was posted by Shibu Basheer on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Categorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.