In OWASP 2003, A3 Broken Authentication and Session Management combines related risk themes across Authentication Failures, Session Management. Authentication failures occur when login, credential, or session mechanisms can be bypassed or abused. Session management weaknesses allow account takeover through stolen, fixed, or poorly invalidated sessions. These weaknesses are often exploited as a chain: attackers start with weak input or trust boundaries, pivot through authorization or session gaps, and then move toward data exposure, integrity loss, or service disruption. Operationally, this can increase incident frequency, enlarge blast radius, and raise both remediation cost and compliance exposure when controls are missing or inconsistently enforced across services.
For OWASP 2003 A3 Broken Authentication and Session Management, apply defense in depth across design, implementation, deployment, and operations rather than relying on a single control. Priority controls include: Use MFA, strong password and token policies, short-lived sessions, and secure credential reset and lockout flows. Rotate session IDs on privilege changes, secure cookies, expire idle sessions, and revoke tokens on logout. Treat mitigation as a continuous program: define security requirements up front, enforce them in CI/CD gates, and verify effectiveness with threat modeling, code review, automated testing, and recurring penetration testing. Add monitoring and incident-response readiness so misconfigurations, abuse patterns, and control regressions are detected early and corrected before they become repeatable attack paths.
The same feature written the risky way, then with the fix applied.
How this risk has ranked in each OWASP release.
Rank by release (taller is higher)
2025Latest
#07A07 Authentication Failures
No change since 20212021
#07A07 Identification and Authentication Failures
↓ Down 5 since 20172017
#02A2 Broken Authentication
↑ Up 1 since 20102010
#03A3 Broken Authentication and Session Management
↑ Up 4 since 20072007
#07A7 Broken Authentication and Session Management
↓ Down 4 since 20042004
#03A3 Broken Authentication and Session Management
No change since 20032003
#03A3 Broken Authentication and Session Management
