In OWASP 2010, A10 Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards combines related risk themes across Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards, Input Validation. Unvalidated redirects and forwards can send users to malicious destinations or bypass intended flow checks. Input validation flaws allow unexpected or malicious data to bypass business and security constraints. 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 2010 A10 Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards, apply defense in depth across design, implementation, deployment, and operations rather than relying on a single control. Priority controls include: Allow redirects only to trusted destinations via allowlists and validate forward targets before navigation. Validate and normalize input with allowlists by type, format, and range before business logic processing. 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.
2010Latest
#10A10 Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
