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OWASP × AWS Series

Beyond the Application: Understanding OWASP Risk in AWS

OWASP risks are commonly discussed at the application layer, but modern applications depend on cloud identities, managed services, resource policies and cross-account access. A weakness in the application may provide the entry point, while AWS permissions determine how far an attacker can move. In this series, we examine how Securitain helps organizations identify the cloud-control weaknesses surrounding five major OWASP Top 10 risks.

Series articles

5 parts · read them in any order

01
OWASP A01
Broken Access Control

Your Application Has Role-Based Access Control. But What About the AWS Role Behind It?

An application can enforce its own roles correctly while the AWS identity behind it stays dangerously overprivileged. The initial flaw is in the app — the blast radius is decided by AWS IAM.

8 min readJul 10, 2026
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02
OWASP A02
Security Misconfiguration

The AWS Misconfiguration That Looks Harmless — Until It Connects to Three Others

Cloud breaches rarely come from one dramatic failure — they come from several overlooked settings that combine. Checking whether S3 Block Public Access is on is not enough.

7 min readJul 9, 2026
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03
OWASP A04
Cryptographic Failures

“Encryption Enabled” Does Not Automatically Mean Your AWS Data Is Protected

Teams treat encryption as yes-or-no. A more useful question is: who can use the KMS key, who can change its policy, and can one identity reach both the object and the key?

8 min readJul 8, 2026
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04
OWASP A07
Authentication Failures

MFA Is Enabled. Why Is Your AWS Account Still Exposed?

A company can report 95% MFA coverage and still be exposed by one unprotected admin, a 400-day-old key, or a GitHub OIDC role with no repository restrictions.

7 min readJul 7, 2026
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05
OWASP A09
Logging & Alerting Failures

Logging Is Not Detection: Turning AWS IAM Events Into Security Context

CloudTrail records what happened. It does not tell you whether a policy change created a privilege-escalation path or whether a new trust expanded your attack surface.

7 min readJul 6, 2026
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