Context
Security Engineering Overview
The OWASP Top 10 is best used as an architectural framework rather than a list of vulnerabilities.
OWASP Top 10 in system design is a way to build security into architectural decisions: from trust boundaries and access models to observability and CI/CD controls. The goal is not to “close checkboxes,” but to systematically reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents.
OWASP Top 10: Architectural Controls
Broken Access Control
Centralized policy engine, deny-by-default, authz on each boundary, tenant isolation.
Cryptographic Failures
TLS everywhere, proper key management, field-level encryption for sensitive attributes.
Injection
Parameterized queries, strict schema validation, secure query builder, sandboxing.
Insecure Design
Threat modeling at the design stage, abuse-case-driven requirements, security review as part of ADR.
Security Misconfiguration
Secure defaults, policy as code, immutable infra, drift detection, baseline hardening.
Vulnerable Components
Dependency governance, SBOM, regular patching cycle and CVE triage based on criticality.
Authentication Failures
MFA, short-lived tokens, refresh flow protection, session revocation.
Integrity Failures
Signed artifacts, supply chain control, verified CI/CD pipeline.
Logging/Monitoring Failures
Audit trail, security telemetry, event correlation, alerting and incident runbooks.
SSRF
Egress policy, network segmentation, deny-list metadata endpoints, safe outbound proxies.
How to implement in lifecycle
- At the requirements stage: record security non-functional requirements and abuse cases.
- At the architecture stage: define trust boundaries, data flows and the area of responsibility of components.
- At the implementation stage: security gates in CI/CD (SAST/DAST/dependency checks/policy checks).
- At the operational stage: observability, detection, incident drills, regular security reviews.
Typical antipatterns
Treat OWASP as a checklist for backend code only, not as an architectural challenge.
No threat modeling for new integrations and external APIs.
Mixing of privileged and untrusted traffic in one access plane.
Security logging without correlation and without clear signals for on-call commands.
Each OWASP item must have an owner, a control, and a performance metric.