OWASP Top 10: Code Review Security

The OWASP Top 10 represents the 10 most critical web application security risks. Each year, these vulnerabilities account for millions of breached records and compromised applications. Yet most security teams catch them too late — during penetration testing, not code review.

The solution: understand each vulnerability, recognize the code patterns that cause it, and catch them during pull request review before they reach production.

1. Broken Access Control

Access control flaws allow users to act outside their intended permissions. Example: a customer viewing another customer's invoice by changing the URL parameter.

Code review pattern: Look for missing authorization checks after authentication. If a user is logged in but you don't validate their permission to access a resource, that's access control failure.

2. Cryptographic Failures

Sensitive data exposed due to weak encryption, hardcoded keys, or use of deprecated algorithms. Example: storing passwords in plaintext or with a weak hash.

Code review pattern: Flag any use of MD5, SHA-1, or DES for encryption. Enforce bcrypt/argon2 for passwords, AES-256 for secrets.

3. Injection (SQL, Command, NoSQL)

User input passed directly to queries without sanitization. Example: "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id=" + userId (vulnerable to SQL injection).

Code review pattern: All database queries should use parameterized statements. Never concatenate user input into SQL strings.

4-10. Other Critical Vulnerabilities

Broken authentication, XML external entities (XXE), broken access control, security misconfiguration, cross-site scripting (XSS), insecure deserialization, using components with known vulnerabilities, insufficient logging and monitoring.

Automated code review can catch many of these patterns. A good security scanner will flag hardcoded credentials, weak encryption, missing input validation, and dependency vulnerabilities automatically.

How to Implement OWASP Review in Your Process

1. Create a security checklist based on OWASP Top 10 and run it on every PR.

2. Use automated tooling to catch obvious issues: secret scanning, dependency checking, static analysis.

3. Reserve manual review for architecture-level decisions and business logic.

4. Train developers to recognize patterns that lead to vulnerabilities.

With AI-powered code review, all of this can happen in seconds instead of hours.