OWASP's New LLM Top 10 Shows Emerging AI Threats

COMMENTARY The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools undoubtedly signifies a new chapter in modern software development. With 63% of organizations currently piloting or deploying AI coding assistants into their development workflows, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and the industry must now make careful moves to integrate it as safely and efficiently as possible. The OWASP Foundation has long been a champion of secure coding best practices, providing extensive coverage on how developers can best defend their codebases from exploitable vulnerabilities. Its recent update to the OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model (LLM) Applications reveals the emerging and most potent threats perpetuated by AI-generated code and generative AI (GenAI) applications, and this is an essential starting point for understanding and mitigating the threats likely to rear their ugly heads. We must focus on integrating solid, foundational controls around developer risk management if we want to see more secure, higher quality software in the future, not to mention make a dent in the flurry of global guidelines that demand applications are released that are secure by design. Prompt Injection's ranking as the No. 1 entry on the latest OWASP Top 10 was unsurprising, given its function as a direct natural language command telling the software what to do (for better or worse). However, Supply Chain Vulnerabilities, which have a much more significant impact at the enterprise level,...