Application Security
13 articles
Input Validation: The First Line of Defense
Input validation is necessary but routinely misunderstood as sufficient on its own. Done correctly, it's a foundational control; done as an afterthought, it's a false sense of security.
Insecure Direct Object References: A Deep Dive
IDOR is simple to explain and simple to exploit, which is exactly why it remains one of the most consistently found vulnerabilities in real-world assessments.
Session Management Vulnerabilities Explained
Session management sits underneath every authenticated interaction, and its failure modes are quiet enough that they routinely survive to production undetected.
Rate Limiting and Its Role in Application Security
Rate limiting is often treated as a performance and cost-control feature, but it's also a core security control against brute force, enumeration, and scraping. Here's how to design it properly.
Testing Single Page Applications for Security Issues
SPAs move logic and state to the client, which changes what security testing needs to cover — from token storage to client-side routing guards to bundled secrets.
Secure Code Review vs Penetration Testing
Code review and penetration testing find genuinely different vulnerability classes because one has source access and the other has an attacker's vantage point. Neither substitutes for the other.
Business Logic Vulnerabilities Automated Scanners Miss
Business logic flaws produce no malformed input, no injection payload, and no scanner signature — which is exactly why they consistently survive automated testing untouched.
Authentication vs Authorization: Testing Both Correctly
Authentication and authorization get conflated constantly, but they fail in different ways and require different test methodology. Here's how to test each properly.
API Security Testing: Beyond the OWASP API Top 10
The OWASP API Security Top 10 is a solid starting point, but API testing needs to go further into workflow state, versioning drift, and undocumented endpoints to be effective.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Explained
XSS remains one of the most common client-side vulnerabilities because it has three distinct flavors, each with different root causes and different fixes.
SQL Injection: Still Relevant in 2026
SQL injection has been a known, fixable vulnerability class for over two decades and it's still routinely found in production. Here's why it persists and how to actually close it out.
Broken Access Control: Why It's the Most Common Web Vulnerability
Broken access control tops the OWASP list for a structural reason: it's a business-logic problem that scanners can't reliably detect. Here's how to actually find and fix it.
OWASP Top 10 Explained in Plain Language
A practitioner's walkthrough of the OWASP Top 10, what each category actually means in production code, and why the list is a floor, not a ceiling.