Broken Access Control: Examples, Detection, and Prevention

Broken access control occurs when applications fail to verify whether an authenticated or anonymous caller is permitted to perform a specific action on a particular resource, enabling unauthorized data access, modification, deletion, or privileged operations through otherwise valid requests. Ranked first in the OWASP Top 10, it includes vertical privilege escalation, where standard users access administrative functions; horizontal escalation, such as changing an object ID to view another user’s invoice; and context-dependent failures involving bypassed workflow, tenant, state, or approval requirements. The material distinguishes authentication from authorization, clarifies commonly misread OWASP prevalence and testing-coverage statistics, and connects web concepts such as IDOR, forced browsing, missing authorization, and client-side-only controls with API categories including BOLA and BFLA. Detection requires both code review and runtime testing, particularly cross-identity tests using multiple accounts and representative resources, since single-session scanners cannot reliably assess ownership or policy boundaries. Recommended prevention measures include denying access by default, enforcing centralized server-side checks at resource and field levels, properly managing sessions, logging authorization decisions, rate limiting abuse, and continuously testing permissions across roles, tenants, methods, objects, and workflows; the text also describes StackHawk’s multi-profile testing and AI-assisted runtime scanning as tools intended to support these practices.

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