OWASP API Security Top 10

Overview

The OWASP API Security Top 10 helps developers, architects, testers, and operators understand recurring API weaknesses. The current released edition is 2023 and includes authorization, authentication, resource consumption, business-flow, configuration, inventory, and unsafe API-consumption risks.

The list is not a complete security standard, certification, or exhaustive test plan. APIs also face vulnerabilities outside the ten categories, while importance depends on data, exposure, business logic, identity, and deployment architecture.

Teams should use the edition explicitly, map categories to threat models and tests, enforce object and function authorization, inventory endpoints, protect resources, and validate third-party responses. Findings require context and remediation verification. Organizations should state the edition whenever assessments or policies reference the list.

For OWASP API Security Top 10, this sequence reveals gaps between documented intent and deployed behavior.

The OWASP API Security Top 10 is an awareness document identifying prominent security-risk categories affecting application programming interfaces. OWASP API Security Top 10 guides awareness and testing, but complete API security requires architecture, inventory, business-logic analysis, and continuous operations.

A production treatment of OWASP API Security Top 10 should test an awareness document identifying prominent security-risk categories affecting application programming interfaces within the relevant asset, decision, or service state. The OWASP API Security context record for an awareness document identifying prominent security-risk should preserve source data, configuration or policy version, responsible actor, exception, and outcome. Review of OWASP API Security Top 10 should determine whether safeguards addressing an awareness document identifying prominent security-risk changed exposure in practice, not merely whether a document or setting existed.

Quality review for OWASP API Security Top 10 should sample real cases involving an awareness document identifying prominent security-risk, compare expected and actual outcomes, and track unresolved exceptions until remediation is independently verified.