Lesson 1 · 10 min
The OWASP LLM Top 10: an engineer's tour
The OWASP LLM Top 10 catalogues the most critical security risks in LLM applications. A working engineer needs to recognize each attack vector and know which layer of the stack it targets.
Why LLM applications need their own security model
Traditional web application security (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF) targets well-defined interfaces with deterministic behavior. LLM applications introduce a new attack surface: a general-purpose text interpreter that executes in natural language, has access to tools, and can generate outputs that affect downstream systems.
The OWASP LLM Top 10 is a community-maintained list of the most critical vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional OWASP rankings, most LLM vulnerabilities exploit the model's language understanding capabilities as the attack vector — the model's strength becomes the security liability.