Web Application Security

Chapter 21. Vulnerability Management

Part of any good secure software development life cycle (SSDL) process is a well-defined pipeline for obtaining, triaging, and resolving vulnerabilities found in a web application. We covered methods of discovering vulnerabilities in the last chapter, and prior to that we covered methods of integrating SSDL into your architecture and development phases to reduce the number of outstanding vulnerabilities found.

Vulnerabilities in a large application will be found in all of these phases, from the architecture phase to production code. Vulnerabilities noted in the architecture phase can be defensively coded against, and countermeasures can be developed before any code is written. Vulnerabilities found any time after the architecture phase need to be properly managed so they can eventually be fixed and any affected environment patched with the fix.

This is where a vulnerability management pipeline comes into play.

Reproducing Vulnerabilities

After a vulnerability report, the first step to manage it should be reproducing the vulnerability in a production-like environment. This has multiple benefits. First off, it allows you to determine if the vulnerability is indeed a vulnerability. Sometimes user-defined configuration errors can look like a vulnerability. For example, a user “accidentally” makes an image on your photo-hosting app “public” when they usually set their photos to “private.”

To reproduce vulnerabilities efficiently, you need to establish ...