Certified Secure Web Application Engineer (CSWAE)

Integrate security into every phase of the secure software development lifecycle to identify risks early, manage budgets, and protect customer data with cost-effective, reliable web applications.

Document security requirements, classify data, and enforce authentication, session management, and access controls. Apply secure design, testing, and change control with logging and audits in production.

explore the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities, including injection flaws and broken authentication, and outline secure practices like input validation and parameterized queries to prevent breaches.

Identify web app vulnerabilities such as session management flaws and cross-site scripting, including stored and reflected XSS, and apply input validation, output encoding, and testing to prevent these attacks.

Explain direct object references and misconfigurations that expose sensitive data and how secure configuration and updated software prevent OWASP top ten breaches. Highlight CSRF and unvalidated redirects, plus data protection.

Identify and integrate risk management from project initiation by assessing business impact and data types. Design tailored controls balancing cost, security, and the organization's acceptable risk.

Identify assets and assess risks to availability, integrity, and confidentiality by evaluating threats, vulnerabilities, likelihood, and impact; compare mitigation options for cost-effective controls, with input from stakeholders and thorough documentation.

Identify and rank risks, choose cost effective mitigations or acceptance, and monitor with a risk register while validating controls to secure web applications.

Assesses threat agents and system context to design tailored security controls, review architecture, examine data flows, and identify vulnerabilities, chokepoints, and third-party risks.

explore authentication and authorization concepts, including masquerading defenses, multi-factor and token-based methods, and common weaknesses like weak passwords and insecure password storage.

Analyze how password construction, change and forgot password flows, secret questions, and error handling reveal vulnerabilities, enabling brute force attempts and security testing of web applications.

Explore how brute force attacks and password cracking tools—rainbow tables and dictionary attacks—exploit weak authentication, the risks of verbose error messages, and how lockout policies and monitoring defend against attacks.

Examine authentication and authorization attacks by testing valid and invalid logins, monitor response times, and evaluate remember me, cookie handling, and two-factor authentication to protect credentials.

Use public key infrastructure to identify and authenticate users with certificates issued to validated individuals. Guard against authorization vulnerabilities and privilege escalation, ensuring least privilege and need-to-know.

Learn how secure session management protects web apps by using robust session tokens, safe transmission, proper invalidation, and defense against hijacking and concurrent sessions.

Design secure by design architectures by weaving security requirements into the system and applying thrift modeling to understand threats; harden deployments, minimize attack surface, and enforce least privilege.

Evaluate buy versus build options early, align on security requirements, and test third-party products rigorously while minimizing data exposure and keeping the attack surface small.

Apply rigorous input validation and data sanitization by treating all input as untrusted, using type, length, range, and format checks to prevent harms from http requests, files, and sequel injections.

Assess external inputs, such as user commands and configuration files, applying input validation and data sanitization. Weigh blacklists and white lists, address canonicalization, delimiter handling, and guard against second-order injection.

Differentiate input filtering from validation and use white listing with known good patterns. Enforce a positive security model by default, deny everything; validate boundaries, log activity, and sanitize inputs.

Explore ajax security in web 2.0, focusing on cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery, and learn to validate data before returning it to the client.