owasp-top-10-testing

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from when this skill was listed. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: owasp-top-10-testing
description: Test an application against the OWASP Top 10 with Strix — autonomous AI agents that attempt real exploits for each category of the current OWASP Top 10:2025 (broken access control including SSRF, security misconfiguration, software supply chain failures, cryptographic failures, injection, insecure design, authentication failures, integrity failures, logging and alerting failures, mishandling of exceptional conditions) and report only what they could actually prove, mapped back to the category with a proof-of-concept. Also covers the OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023). Use when the user asks for an OWASP Top 10 assessment, OWASP compliance testing, or a security review mapped to OWASP categories.
license: Apache-2.0
metadata:
  author: usestrix
  homepage: https://docs.strix.ai
---

# Test against the OWASP Top 10

The OWASP Top 10 is a taxonomy of risk categories, not a test suite — "OWASP Top 10 testing" means exercising each category against the real application and reporting what's actually exploitable. Strix's agents do the exploitation; this skill covers running it category-by-category and reporting coverage honestly.

**Use the current edition: [OWASP Top 10:2025](https://owasp.org/Top10/)** (8th installment, superseding 2021). Ask the user before targeting an older edition — some compliance checklists still reference 2021, and a report labelled with the wrong edition is misleading. Key differences from 2021: **SSRF is folded into A01**, **A03 Software Supply Chain Failures** expands the old "Vulnerable and Outdated Components", and **A10 Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions** is new; A02 Security Misconfiguration moved 5→2.

Install, LLM setup, and the managed-cloud alternative: **penetration-testing-with-strix**. For a run with no Docker and no LLM key, the same binary drives the managed platform: `strix cloud login`, then `strix cloud scans start ...` (details in **managed-pentesting-with-strix**).

## What is and is not testable by an agent

Be straight with the user about this — claiming a clean sweep of all ten is misleading.

| Category (2025) | Coverage |
|---|---|
| A01 Broken Access Control (incl. SSRF) | **Strong** — cross-user/tenant access, privilege escalation, IDOR, and SSRF (including blind, via out-of-band callbacks) are all exploit-validated. Needs two accounts plus a privileged one to prove the authorization half. |
| A02 Security Misconfiguration | **Strong** — debug endpoints, verbose errors, permissive CORS, missing hardening, default credentials, exposed admin surfaces. |
| A03 Software Supply Chain Failures | **Partial** — version fingerprinting, and vulnerable/outdated dependency review when source is supplied. Build-system and distribution-infrastructure compromise (the broader half of this category) is out of scope for a runtime scan — pair with SCA plus build-provenance controls. |
| A04 Cryptographic Failures | **Partial** — transport config, unencrypted data in transit, secrets and tokens leaked in responses. At-rest crypto and key management need source or infra review. |
| A05 Injection | **Strong** — SQL/NoSQL/command/template injection and XSS, exploit-validated. |
| A06 Insecure Design | **Partial** — business-logic abuse (price/quantity tampering, workflow skipping, race conditions) is found where reachable; design intent still needs human review and threat modelling. |
| A07 Authentication Failures | **Strong** — auth bypass, weak session/token handling, password-reset and MFA flaws. |
| A08 Software or Data Integrity Failures | **Partial** — insecure deserialization and unsigned-update paths where reachable; CI/CD trust boundaries are not runtime-testable. |
| A09 Security Logging & Alerting Failures | **Not testable from outside** — requires reviewing the logging and alerting pipeline. State this rather than reporting it as passed. |
| A10 Mishandling of Exceptional Conditions | **Partial** — agents actively probe error handling and fail-op