By Samyuktha

Introduction

Some categories in the OWASP Top 10 are about what's broken in your own code. A03 and A04 are about something a little different — whether you can trust what your application depends on, and whether sensitive data is actually protected wherever it lives or travels. This post covers what I learned about both categories, and how I applied that thinking to an authorized web application afterward.

The result wasn't a dramatic one, and part of it wasn't even fully testable. Both of those turned out to be useful lessons in their own right.

Scope: This post covers concepts I studied around A03 and A04, plus a hands-on look at the client-side resources, storage, and login/dashboard flow of an authorized application. No destructive testing was performed, and identifying details about the target have been omitted. I'll refer to it simply as the assessed application.