The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an open-source application security project. The OWASP community includes corporations, educational organizations, and individuals from around the world. This community works to create freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies. The OWASP Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that supports and manages OWASP projects and infrastructure. It is also a registered non profit in Europe since June 2011.
OWASP is not affiliated with any technology company, although it supports the informed use of security technology. OWASP has avoided affiliation as it believes freedom from organizational pressures may make it easier for it to provide unbiased, practical, cost-effective information about application security. OWASP advocates approaching application security by considering the people, process, and technology dimensions.
OWASP's most successful documents include the book-length OWASP Guide, The OWASP Code Review Guide :OWASP_Code_Review_Project and the widely adopted OWASP Top 10 awareness document. The most widely used OWASP tools include their training environment WebGoat, their penetration testing proxy WebScarab, and their OWASP .NET tools. OWASP includes roughly 100 local chapters around the world and thousands of participants on the project mailing lists. OWASP has organized the AppSec series of conferences to further build the application security community.
OWASP is also an emerging standards body, with the publication of its first standard in December 2008, the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS). The primary aim of the OWASP ASVS Project is to normalize the range of coverage and level of rigor available in the market when it comes to performing application-level security verification. The goal is to create a set of commercially-workable open standards that are tailored to specific web-based technologies. A Web Application Edition has been published. A Web Service Edition is under development.
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OWASP projects are broadly divided into two main categories, development projects, and documentation projects. Its documentation projects currently consist of:
OWASP was started on September 9, 2001 By Mark Curphey and Dennis Groves. Since late 2003, Jeff Williams served as the volunteer Chair of OWASP until September 2011. The current chair is Michael Coates, and vice chair is Eoin Keary. The OWASP Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization (in the USA) was established in 2004 and supports the OWASP infrastructure and projects. OWASP is not about individual recognition but community knowledge sharing. The OWASP Leaders are responsible for making decisions about technical direction, project priorities, schedule, and releases. Collectively, the OWASP Leaders can be thought of as the management of the OWASP Foundation.
OWASP has 3 employees and very low expenses, which are covered by conferences, corporate sponsors and banner advertisements. OWASP awards thousands of dollars each year of corporate and individual membership dues as grants to promising applications security research projects.