Issue Details
Broken Authentication and Session Management
Aliases: None
Explanation
In OWASP 2003, A3 Broken Authentication and Session Management combines related risk themes across Authentication Failures, Session Management. Authentication failures occur when login, credential, or session mechanisms can be bypassed or abused. Session management weaknesses allow account takeover through stolen, fixed, or poorly invalidated sessions. These weaknesses are often exploited as a chain: attackers start with weak input or trust boundaries, pivot through authorization or session gaps, and then move toward data exposure, integrity loss, or service disruption. Operationally, this can increase incident frequency, enlarge blast radius, and raise both remediation cost and compliance exposure when controls are missing or inconsistently enforced across services.
Remedy
For OWASP 2003 A3 Broken Authentication and Session Management, apply defense in depth across design, implementation, deployment, and operations rather than relying on a single control. Priority controls include: Use MFA, strong password and token policies, short-lived sessions, and secure credential reset and lockout flows. Rotate session IDs on privilege changes, secure cookies, expire idle sessions, and revoke tokens on logout. Treat mitigation as a continuous program: define security requirements up front, enforce them in CI/CD gates, and verify effectiveness with threat modeling, code review, automated testing, and recurring penetration testing. Add monitoring and incident-response readiness so misconfigurations, abuse patterns, and control regressions are detected early and corrected before they become repeatable attack paths.
| Year | Rank | Category |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | #3 | A3 - Broken Authentication and Session Management |
| 2004 | #3 | A3 - Broken Authentication and Session Management |
| 2007 | #7 | A7 - Broken Authentication and Session Management |
| 2010 | #3 | A3 - Broken Authentication and Session Management |
| 2017 | #2 | A2 - Broken Authentication |
| 2021 | #7 | A07 - Identification and Authentication Failures |
| 2025 | #7 | A07 - Authentication Failures |