Designing Secure Applications Using the OWASP Top 10

About this course

This course features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. Modern applications operate in increasingly complex environments where cloud-native architectures, APIs, microservices, software supply chains, and distributed identities introduce new security challenges. In this course, you will learn how to design secure applications by applying the principles behind the OWASP Top 10, the world's most recognized framework for application security risks. Rather than focusing solely on vulnerability remediation, you will develop a security-first architectural mindset that helps prevent weaknesses before they emerge. You will begin by exploring how the application threat landscape has evolved, understanding attacker economics, breach lifecycles, and the methodology OWASP uses to identify and rank risks. From there, you will examine the foundations of secure architecture and discover how design decisions directly influence security outcomes across modern systems and platforms. As the course progresses, you will perform a deep analysis of each OWASP Top 10 category, including Broken Access Control, Cryptographic Failures, Injection, Insecure Design, Security Misconfiguration, Vulnerable Components, Authentication Failures, Software Integrity Risks, Logging and Monitoring Failures, and SSRF. Through architecture-focused discussions, real-world breach case studies, secure-by-design patterns, and hands-on labs, you will learn practical strategies for preventing and mitigating these risks in enterprise environments. This course is designed for software developers, software architects, DevSecOps engineers, cybersecurity professionals, cloud engineers, technical leaders, and IT practitioners who want to strengthen application security expertise. A basic understanding of software development, web applications, networking, and cloud concepts is recommended. The course is suitable for learners at an intermediate level seeking to bridge security theory and secure system design. By the end of the course, you will be able to evaluate application architectures through the lens of the OWASP Top 10, identify and analyze modern security risks, design secure-by-default systems, implement effective mitigation strategies, assess software supply chain and identity-related threats, operationalize application security programs, and integrate security principles into enterprise technology decisions.