RE: OWASP Top Ten - why taxing taxonomies?

["Evans, Arian" <Arian.Evans () fishnetsecurity com>]

There's many reasons but the short answer I'll give is:

I organize my report data in this fashion because:

1. Root cause analysis.

2. The CISO using the data can clearly see that OWASP T10 #10
issues go to the web server admins and #T4 issues go to the
presentation layer developers and #T1 issues go to the business
logic guys.

3. Who cares about XSS?

If you strongly type your data and make intelligent decisions
about output encoding it's unlikely to be an issue.

People will spend weeks going on an XSS bughunt and miss a
few characters that still let one do XSS, or we could spend
the same two weeks implement strong presentation I/O handling
and kill many birds with one stone.

YMMV, of course. Whatever works for you...

-ae

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frank O'Dwyer [mailto:fod () littlecatZ com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 4:14 PM
> To: Evans, Arian
> Cc: Ralf Durkee; Mark Curphey; webappsec () securityfocus com; 
> Jeff Williams
> Subject: Re: OWASP Top Ten - taxing taxonomies
>
> Evans, Arian wrote:
>
> > [...]
> >
> > Here's three elements I use in distinction in my Taxonomy of 
> 'Issues':
> > Class, Category, Particular, e.g.--
> >
> > Class--programmatic
> > Category--input validation (or output encoding)
> > Particular--XSS 
> >  
> I know I am going to regret asking this, but what would 
> anyone use this
> for? Also what makes you think these things fit into a 
> hierarchy at all,
> never mind an objective one? There are any number of ways to 
> categorise
> these things. They have a habit of belonging in more than one 
> category, too.
>
> This really doesn't strike me as any more compelling than the folders
> you might use to file your email or documents in. Very useful for you
> maybe, but probably nobody else would find their way around 
> it. That is
> why these things always wind up up having multiple views and 
> a 'search'
> button.
>
> Cheers,
> Frank


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