Securing Web Applications: A Practical Approach to Mitigating OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities

• Published in: VFAST Transactions on Software Engineering Vol. 13; no. 2; pp. 273 - 291
• Main Authors: Khan, Shah Aftab, Azim, Nazia, Iqbal, Asad, Abbas, Hassan, Qureshi, Sawera
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 30.06.2025
• ISSN: 2411-6246; 2309-3978
• DOI: 10.21015/vtse.v13i2.2145

The exponential growth of online platforms and application has made us believe that securing web apps is more important to mitigate attacks viz., data breaches, frauds, unauthorized access etc. But web applications are still vulnerable in a number of ways that can be abused by attackers. In this context, we propose a pipeline to identify and reduce security threats in web applications, focusing on the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities — highly publicized risks with clear exploitation vector; namely: injection attacks, broken authentication, sensitive data exposure or cross-site scripting. For every vulnerability, we cover them with practical demonstrations by using BeeWAP (Beehive's Educational Web Application Platform), an intentionally vulnerable web application for the Web testing and security education purpose. The vulnerabilities are analyzed based on real-world contexts in BeeWAP platform, which helps to assess the implications of web application security. We are using techniques of standard tools like Burp Suite to find these weak points and also implementing countermeasures, hence gives an all-in-one manual focused on securing applications from threats.It elaborates a methodology to identify vulnerabilities, perform risk analysis to develop security models that respond specifically to the identified OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. In this paper, we demonstrate real-time risk mitigation by simulating common attack vectors and showing the resulting insight into good practices for securing web applications. In this direction, the present paper tries to step forward towards reconciliation between theory and practice, by providing a structured model that represents a compromise that security personnel and developers can use directly in order to improve defensive capability in applications. More specifically, our results emphasize the importance of constant vulnerability testing and continual training of cybersafety measures on protected infrastructures. These practices, when enacted by developers, can bolster defenses against the ever-evolving nature of cyber threats and ultimately lead to more trustworthy and reliable web applications.