A curated list of resources for learning about application security. Contains books, websites, blog posts, and self-assessment quizzes.
Maintained by Paragon Initiative Enterprises with contributions from the application security and developer communities. We also have other community projects which might be useful for tomorrow's application security experts.
If you are an absolute beginner to the topic of software security, you may benefit from reading A Gentle Introduction to Application Security.
Please refer to the contributing guide for details.
- General
- Articles
- Books
- Web Application Hacker's Handbook (2011)
- Cryptography Engineering (2010)
- Gray Hat Python: Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers (2009)
- The Art of Software Security Assessment: Identifying and Preventing Software Vulnerabilities (2006)
- C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software (1996)
- Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering (2005)
- JavaScript: The Good parts (2008)
- Windows Internals: Including Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, Fifth Edition (2007)
- The Mac Hacker's Handbook (2009)
- The IDA Pro Book: The Unofficial Guide to the World's Most Popular Disassembler (2008)
- Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol. II: ANSI C Version: Design, Implementation, and Internals (3rd Edition) (1998)
- Network Algorithmics,: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing Fast Networked Devices (2004)
- Computation Structures (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) (1989)
- Surreptitious Software: Obfuscation, Watermarking, and Tamperproofing for Software Protection (2009)
- Secure Programming HOWTO (2015)
- Security Engineering - Second Edition (2008)
- Web Application Hacker's Handbook (2011)
- Classes
- Websites
- Android
- C
- C++
- C Sharp
- Java
- Node.js
- PHP
- Articles
- It's All About Time (2014)
- Secure Authentication in PHP with Long-Term Persistence (2015)
- 20 Point List For Preventing Cross-Site Scripting In PHP (2013)
- 25 PHP Security Best Practices For Sys Admins (2011)
- PHP data encryption primer (2014)
- Preventing SQL Injection in PHP Applications - the Easy and Definitive Guide (2014)
- You Wouldn't Base64 a Password - Cryptography Decoded (2015)
- A Guide to Secure Data Encryption in PHP Applications (2015)
- Books and ebooks
- Useful libraries
- Websites
- Articles
- Perl
- Python
- Ruby
Released: February 25, 2014
Advice on cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators.
Released: August 6, 2014
A post on Crackstation, a project by Defuse Security
Released: May 3, 2014
Mentions many ways to make /dev/urandom fail on Linux/BSD.
Released: June 21, 2015
Running a business requires being cost-conscious and minimizing unnecessary spending. The benefits of ensuring in the security of your application are invisible to most companies, so often times they neglect to invest in secure software development as a cost-saving measure. What these companies don't realize is the potential cost (both financial and to brand reputation) a preventable data compromise can incur.
The average data breach costs millions of dollars in damage.
Investing more time and personnel to develop secure software is, for most companies, worth it to minimize this unnecessary risk to their bottom line.
Released: September 27, 2011
Great introduction to Web Application Security; though slightly dated.
Cryptography Engineering (2010)
Released: March 15, 2010
Develops a sense of professional paranoia while presenting crypto design techniques.
Released: May 3, 2009
Released: November 30, 2006
Released: August 30, 1996
Released: April 15, 2005
JavaScript: The Good parts (2008)
Released: May 1, 2008
Released: June 17, 2007
The Mac Hacker's Handbook (2009)
Released: March 3, 2009
Released: August 22, 2008
Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol. II: ANSI C Version: Design, Implementation, and Internals (3rd Edition) (1998)
Released: June 25, 1998
Released: December 29, 2004
Released: December 13, 1989
Surreptitious Software: Obfuscation, Watermarking, and Tamperproofing for Software Protection (2009)
Released: August 3, 2009
Secure Programming HOWTO (2015)
Released: March 1, 2015
Released: April 14, 2008
A vulnerability research and exploit development class by Owen Redwood of Florida State University.
Be sure to check out the lectures!
Developed from the materials of NYU Poly's old Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Analysis course, Hack Night is a sobering introduction to offensive security. A lot of complex technical content is covered very quickly as students are introduced to a wide variety of complex and immersive topics over thirteen weeks.
Learn about application security by attempting to hack this website.
Self-assessment quiz for web application security
Secure passwords in several languages/frameworks.
A list of security news sources.
Video courses on low-level x86 programming, hacking, and forensics.
Capture The Flag - Learn Assembly and Embedded Device Security
A series of programming exercises for teaching oneself cryptography by Matasano Security. The introduction by Maciej Ceglowski explains it well.
PentesterLab provides free Hands-On exercises and a bootcamp to get started.
An intentionally insecure Javascript Web Application.
Showcasing bad cryptography
The blog of NCC Group, formerly Matasano, iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure.
The top ten most common and critical security vulnerabilities found in web applications.
Released: February 24, 2015
A community-maintained Wiki detailing secure coding standards for Android development.
SEI CERT C Coding Standard (2006)
Released: May 24, 2006
A community-maintained Wiki detailing secure coding standards for C programming.
Released: October 21, 2015
Provides guidelines for improving software security through secure coding. Covers common programming languages and libraries, and focuses on concrete recommendations.
SEI CERT C++ Coding Standard (2006)
Released: July 18, 2006
A community-maintained Wiki detailing secure coding standards for C++ programming.
Security Driven .NET (2015)
Released: July 14, 2015
An introduction to developing secure applications targeting version 4.5 of the .NET Framework, specifically covering cryptography and security engineering topics.
Released: January 12, 2007
A community-maintained Wiki detailing secure coding standards for Java programming.
Released: April 2, 2014
Secure Java programming guidelines straight from Oracle.
Released: October 13, 2015
Covers a lot of useful information for developing secure Node.js applications.
Learn from the team that spearheaded the Node Security Project
It's All About Time (2014)
Released: November 28, 2014
A gentle introduction to timing attacks in PHP applications
Released: April 21, 2015
Discusses password policies, password storage, "remember me" cookies, and account recovery.
Released: April 22, 2013
Padriac Brady's advice on building software that isn't vulnerable to XSS
Released: November 23, 2011
Though this article is a few years old, much of its advice is still relevant as we veer around the corner towards PHP 7.
PHP data encryption primer (2014)
Released: June 16, 2014
@timoh6 explains implementing data encryption in PHP
Released: May 26, 2014
TL;DR - don't escape, use prepared statements instead!
Released: August 7, 2015
A human-readable overview of commonly misused cryptography terms and fundamental concepts, with example code in PHP.
If you're confused about cryptography terms, start here.
Released: August 2, 2015
Discusses the importance of end-to-end network-layer encryption (HTTPS) as well as secure encryption for data at rest, then introduces the specific cryptography tools that developers should use for specific use cases, whether they use libsodium, Defuse Security's secure PHP encryption library, or OpenSSL.
Securing PHP: Core Concepts acts as a guide to some of the most common security terms and provides some examples of them in every day PHP.
You shouldn't need a Ph.D in Applied Cryptography to build a secure web application. Enter libsodium, which allows developers to develop fast, secure, and reliable applications without needing to know what a stream cipher even is.
Symmetric-key encryption library for PHP applications. (Recommended over rolling your own!)
If you're using PHP 5.3.7+ or 5.4, use this to hash passwords
Useful for generating random strings or numbers
A secure OAuth2 server implementation
PHP 7 offers a new set of CSPRNG functions: random_bytes() and random_int(). This is a community effort to expose the same API in PHP 5 projects (forward compatibility layer). Permissively MIT licensed.
A secure authentication and authorization library that implements Role-Based Access Controls and Paragon Initiative Enterprises' recommendaitons for secure "remember me" checkboxes.
websec.io is dedicated to educating developers about security with topics relating to general security fundamentals, emerging technologies and PHP-specific information
The blog of our technology and security consulting firm based in Orlando, FL
A blog about PHP, Security, Performance and general web application development.
Pádraic Brady is a Zend Framework security expert
A weekly newsletter about PHP, security, and the community.
Released: January 10, 2011
A community-maintained Wiki detailing secure coding standards for Perl programming.
Lists standard library features that should be avoided, and references sections of other chapters that are Python-specific.
OWASP Python Security Wiki (2014)
Released: June 21, 2014
A wiki maintained by the OWASP Python Security project.
Released: March 10, 2014
A guide to secure Ruby development by the Fedora Security Team. Also available on Github.