The 10 Most Common Security Vulnerabilities in Vibe Coded Apps

When Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” in February 2025, he captured something revolutionary: people with no programming background can now build functional applications by describing what they want in plain English. Tools like Windsurf, Cursor, and Bolt generate entire codebases from simple prompts.

But when you’re letting AI write every line without understanding what it’s doing, security becomes an afterthought. The OWASP Top 10 shows exactly why this matters. These vulnerabilities hit vibe-coded apps especially hard.

Table of contents

1. Broken Access Control

This is consistently the most prevalent vulnerability because when you’re coding fast, access control gets treated as a nice-to-have rather than a foundation. The classic example: your URL structure is /user/123/orders and you check if the user is logged in, but not if they’re user 123. Change the number, get someone else’s orders.

In 2014, Snapchat learned this lesson when 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers were exposed through their “Find Friends” API. Security researchers had warned them about the vulnerability, but Snapchat dismissed it as “theoretical.” A week later, hackers proved it wasn’t theoretical by scraping millions of user records and publishing them online.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

Authorization logic gets generated without understanding the security implications. New features added through AI prompts bypass existing security patterns. Frontend restrictions get implemented without backend enforcement. Role-based access controls get treated as UI concerns rather than security boundaries.

What you can do:

Build authorization checks into your initial AI prompts: “include user authorization for all data access.” Test your app with different user accounts, not just the admin account the AI probably created. Explicitly ask AI to implement object-level permissions: “ensure users can only access their own data.” Use established authentication services rather than prompting AI to “create a login system.”

2. Cryptographic Failures

Several widely used content management systems still use MD5 for password hashing. MD5 has been cryptographically broken since 2004, with collisions findable within seconds on modern hardware. It persists because “it works” until an attacker with a dictionary and some patience proves that it doesn’t.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

Default configurations left unchanged. Weak algorithms chosen for compatibility. Encryption keys hardcoded in source control. HTTPS treated as optional for “internal” services.

What you can do:

Use your platform’s built-in crypto libraries. Enable TLS everywhere, including internal communications. Store secrets in environment variables or secret management services. Use bcrypt or Argon2 for password hashing, never MD5 or SHA1.

3. Injection

Injection vulnerabilities remain critical, with cross-site scripting now grouped in this category. They’re particularly brutal for vibe-coded apps because proper input validation feels like it slows down the feedback loop.

In 2015-2016, eBay had a severe XSS vulnerability where their “url” parameter redirected users without validation. Attackers exploited this to gain full access to seller accounts, manipulate high-value listings, and steal payment details. The vulnerability continued to be actively exploited until 2017, showing how XSS problems persist once they’re in the wild, especially when the people maintaining the code don’t fully understand how it works.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

User input gets directly interpolated into SQL queries. Template engines render user content without escaping. Form validation happens only on the frontend. API endpoints trust all incoming data.

What you can do:

Use parameterized queries for all database operations. Enable auto-escaping in your template engine. Validate and sanitize inputs on the server side. Use Content Security Policy headers to limit XSS impact.

4. Insecure Design

This category highlights missing threat modeling entirely. When you’re vibing your way through development, security considerations don’t make it into the design phase.

Consider password reset functionality. Secure design asks: “How do we prevent account takeover through this feature?” Insecure design asks: “How do we let users reset passwords?” The difference is considering adversarial use cases upfront.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

Security requirements never get written down. Threat modeling skipped entirely. Authentication flows copied from tutorials without understanding. Business logic vulnerabilities baked into the architecture.

What you can do:

Spend 30 minutes on threat modeling before you start coding. Use established authentication libraries instead of rolling your own. Design for the adversarial case, not just the happy path. Document your security assumptions and revisit them.

5. Security Misconfiguration

Security misconfiguration affects 90% of applications, making it the “death by a thousand cuts” vulnerability. Vibe-coded apps inherit whatever defaults their frameworks provide, often without understanding the security implications.

I’ve seen database servers exposed to the internet with default credentials and cloud storage buckets configured for public read access.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

Default configurations accepted without understanding security implications. Error messages generated by AI expose sensitive information in user-friendly formats. AI tools enable unnecessary features without considering attack surface. Security headers completely ignored unless explicitly prompted for.

What you can do:

Use security-focused configuration checklists for your tech stack. Implement proper error handling that doesn’t leak information. Disable unnecessary features and services. Set up security headers like HSTS, CSP, and X-Frame-Options.

6. Vulnerable and Outdated Components

Modern development means heavy dependency on third-party packages. Whenever you add dependencies, you inherit all the security vulnerabilities from them and their dependencies.

Team GhostShell demonstrated this perfectly when they used SQL injection vulnerabilities in outdated components to target 53 universities, stealing and publishing 36,000 personal records. The attack succeeded because institutions were running vulnerable versions of common web applications.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

Package management handled automatically without vulnerability awareness. No understanding of what’s actually running in the generated codebase. AI tools bundle whatever packages seem relevant without security consideration.

What you can do:

Use tools like npm audit or Snyk to scan for vulnerabilities. Keep dependencies updated regularly, not just when things break. Minimize your dependency footprint. Question if you really need that package.

7. Identification and Authentication Failures

Authentication vulnerabilities remain critical despite improved framework support. Vibe-coded apps often treat authentication as a solved problem. Just throw in a JWT library and call it done. But proper authentication involves session management, password policies, multi-factor authentication, and secure account recovery.

Fortnite, with over 350 million users, discovered a SQL injection vulnerability in 2019 that could have let attackers access user accounts. The vulnerability was in authentication-related code that hadn’t been properly validated against injection attacks.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

Authentication flows generated without understanding session security. AI implements “login functionality” without considering password policies or account lockout. Multi-factor authentication skipped because it’s not in the initial prompt. Token management handled by whatever the AI considers “standard practice.”

What you can do:

Use established authentication services like Auth0, Firebase Auth, or AWS Cognito. Implement proper session timeout and invalidation. Require strong passwords and consider passwordless options. Add rate limiting to login endpoints.

8. Software and Data Integrity Failures

This category reflects modern development realities where vibe-coded apps often skip integrity verification entirely. You trust that packages, auto-updates, and CI/CD systems behave correctly.

The 2012 Flame malware demonstrated this vulnerability at scale. It used MD5 hash collisions to generate counterfeit Microsoft update certificates, allowing it to spread through legitimate update mechanisms. The attack succeeded because systems trusted the update process without proper integrity verification.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

AI auto-updates enabled without integrity verification. Generated CI/CD pipelines run without understanding security implications. Dependencies fetched based on AI training data, not current security status. Serialized data handling implemented without validation because “it works.”

What you can do:

Use package-lock files and verify checksums. Sign your releases and verify signatures on updates. Implement proper input validation for all serialized data. Use secure channels for all dependency downloads.

9. Security Logging and Monitoring Failures

This expanded category reflects that you can’t secure what you can’t see. Vibe-coded apps often have excellent application logging for debugging but terrible security logging for detection.

When you’re building quickly, logging feels like overhead. You log what helps with development but miss security events entirely. Then when something goes wrong, you have no way to understand what happened or when it started.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

Authentication failures not logged. Administrative actions happen without audit trails. Log retention policies non-existent. No alerting on suspicious patterns.

What you can do:

Log all authentication events (success and failure). Implement centralized logging for security events. Set up alerts for unusual patterns (multiple failed logins, admin actions, etc.). Retain logs long enough to detect slow-moving attacks.

10. Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

SSRF exploits applications that make HTTP requests based on user input. Vibe-coded apps often implement features like URL previews, webhook processing, or image fetching without considering that attackers can point these requests at internal services.

The attack is subtle: your application becomes a proxy for accessing internal resources that should be protected by network boundaries. An attacker tricks your server into making requests to http://localhost:5432 or internal cloud metadata services.

What happens in vibe-coded apps:

AI implements URL processing features without understanding internal network risks. Webhook endpoints generated without URL validation because the AI focuses on functionality. Image processing or link preview features created without considering SSRF. No understanding that “make HTTP requests” can target internal services.

What you can do:

Validate and restrict all outbound HTTP requests. Use allowlists for permitted domains and IP ranges. Implement network segmentation to limit internal access. Consider using dedicated services for external URL processing.

The Vibe Check Reality

The security problems in vibe-coded apps aren’t usually in the novel features you describe to the AI. They’re in all the boring, fundamental stuff that doesn’t make it into your prompts. Authentication, authorization, input validation, configuration management. The unsexy fundamentals that experienced developers know to consider but newcomers don’t know to ask for.

You can build security awareness into your vibe coding process. Learn enough about security fundamentals to know what to ask for. Prompt for specific security features explicitly: “include input validation,” “implement proper access controls,” “add security headers.” Use AI tools that have been trained on secure coding practices, and always specify security requirements in your initial prompts.

The OWASP Top 10 isn’t meant to be comprehensive. It highlights the most common vulnerabilities that actual organizations are dealing with in production. For vibe-coded apps, it’s the perfect checklist to review after your AI generates an application but before you deploy it.