¶ SAP ABAP crimes
¶ SAP
The narrative treats “crimes” as improper practices, misuse patterns, security lapses, and systemic violations of ABAP design principles—not as instructions for wrongdoing.
¶ Introduction to the World of SAP-ABAP “Crimes”: Understanding Risks, Misuse Patterns, and the Ethics of Enterprise Development
In the universe of contemporary enterprise software, few platforms occupy as central a position as SAP. Whether an organisation is orchestrating its financial engines, navigating global procurement, harmonising its supply chain, or managing the lifeblood of its HR systems, SAP forms the invisible architecture that sustains daily corporate life across continents. At the heart of this vast ecosystem lies ABAP—Advanced Business Application Programming—a language that has shaped how enterprises think about customisation, integration, and system-driven intelligence for decades.
Yet, wherever there is power, complexity, and scale, there is also the possibility of misuse. And it is this intersection—where good intentions collide with poor judgement, where convenience eclipses compliance, and where rogue coding patterns quietly erode system integrity—that gives rise to what practitioners wryly refer to as "ABAP crimes." These are not literal crimes, but metaphorical ones: unethical shortcuts, dangerous coding habits, security-blind enhancements, and violations of architectural logic that threaten the stability and trustworthiness of SAP landscapes.
This course, structured across a purposeful sequence of one hundred carefully curated articles, is designed to illuminate this neglected but critical corner of SAP-ABAP practice. It aims to guide learners, developers, auditors, architects, and managers through the complex terrain of risks, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, anti-patterns, and ethical considerations that determine whether ABAP development becomes the backbone of enterprise excellence—or an unseen source of organisational fragility.
In an era where businesses are scrutinising every layer of their digital infrastructure, the importance of understanding “ABAP crimes” has never been greater. Systems once considered secure by default now exist in a climate shaped by sophisticated cyberattacks, internal misuse, erroneous enhancements, and accidental breaches caused by nothing more malicious than ignorance or haste. The challenge before us is not merely to write functional ABAP code but to cultivate development philosophies grounded in security, transparency, compliance, and responsible engineering.
¶ Why Discuss “Crimes” in ABAP?
The language of crime is provocative, yet it serves a strategic pedagogical purpose. In the world of enterprise development, mistakes are rarely trivial; they accumulate over time, influence downstream processes, compromise auditability, and create failures that become visible only when they have ripened into losses.
A poorly written SELECT statement may seem harmless today, but in a financial closing cycle involving millions of line items, the same statement becomes a performance bottleneck that cripples business operations. An unauthorised modification to a standard SAP object might work flawlessly during testing, only to break after an upgrade and halt order-to-cash processing. A developer ignoring authority checks may feel they are simply “speeding up” a request, but such an omission inadvertently opens the gates to privilege abuse.
In other words, an ABAP “crime” is any decision—technical or ethical—that undermines the principles of correctness, security, maintainability, compliance, or system health. This course examines such decisions not to amplify negativity, but to converge on their remedies, root causes, and deeper implications. By understanding what goes wrong, we cultivate the wisdom required to ensure things go right.
¶ The Ethical Dimension of ABAP Development
While SAP is often viewed through a technological lens, ABAP development is intrinsically ethical. Every line of code has consequences. It instructs systems on how data should be read, transformed, transported, stored, or protected. When that data includes payroll details, medical reimbursements, vendor contracts, financial statements, or strategic forecasts, the responsibilities borne by the developer intensify dramatically.
ABAP “crimes” often stem not from malicious intent but from ethical oversights—ignoring documentation, circumventing policies, introducing backdoor behaviours, or writing enhancements that sacrifice compliance for convenience. A systemic blindness to procedural ethics can become a silent precursor to data leakage, unauthorised access, financial inconsistencies, or audit failures.
One of the goals of this course is therefore to cultivate ethical literacy in SAP work. The developer who understands the ethical landscape of enterprise data behaves with greater foresight and maturity than one who views ABAP purely as a programming challenge. Technical transitions—from on-premise ECC to cloud-driven S/4HANA—have made ethical ABAP even more imperative. Systems are now interconnected, data travels faster and further, and a single problematic artefact can escalate into a multi-regional disruption.
Ethical ABAP is no longer optional; it is a fundamental prerequisite for digital trust.
¶ A Landscape Rich with Risks, Missteps, and Misconceptions
Over the course of this program’s one hundred articles, we explore the multidimensional landscape in which ABAP “crimes” commonly occur. These include:
¶ 1. Security Violations
- Missing authorization checks
- Improper handling of sensitive fields
- Flawed RFC function modules
- Backdoor-like behaviours in custom developments
- Hardcoded credentials or unchecked API integrations
Security flaws remain among the highest-impact forms of ABAP misuse, particularly as organisations integrate SAP with cloud, mobile, and third-party ecosystems.
¶ 2. Performance Anti-patterns
- SELECT * misuse
- Nested database calls
- Inefficient loops
- Overloaded internal tables
- Ignoring parallelisation or modern CDS-based approaches
These anti-patterns do not merely degrade performance; they introduce operational risk, increase hardware costs, and create systemic fragility.
¶ 3. Violations of SAP’s Architectural Principles
- Modifying SAP standard directly
- Bypassing BAdIs, enhancement spots, or frameworks
- Implementing custom logic that contradicts SAP upgrade pathways
- Misusing user exits or implicit enhancements
These patterns obstruct maintainability and make future upgrades difficult, costly, and unpredictable.
¶ 4. Audit and Compliance Failures
- Custom reports that distort financial visibility
- Undocumented logic in critical paths
- Data manipulations that lack traceability
- Violations of segregation-of-duties norms
As regulatory landscapes tighten, such “crimes” pose organisational and reputational risks.
¶ 5. Misuse of Modern ABAP Features
- Incorrect or insecure use of CDS views
- Poorly designed OData services
- Uncontrolled exposure of sensitive data through APIs
- Misaligned S/4HANA extensions
The move to S/4HANA has introduced new responsibilities; developers must rethink old habits and adopt practices suitable for a HANA-centric world.
¶ 6. Cultural and Organisational Contributors
ABAP crimes seldom originate from a single developer. They often bloom in environments where:
- Documentation is undervalued
- Testing is rushed
- Quality gates are weak
- Business pressures override good practice
- Legacy systems shape harmful norms
Understanding these contextual factors is just as important as mastering the technical details.
¶ The Purpose and Promise of This 100-Article Course
This course is not a catalogue of mistakes; it is a blueprint for mastery. Through a progressive and engaging journey, each article will:
-
Reveal a specific ABAP misuse pattern or vulnerability
Illustrating how it arises and why it matters. -
Trace its operational and architectural consequences
Using real-world inspired scenarios. -
Explain the ethical, compliance, and security dimensions
That influence responsible programming in enterprise environments. -
Guide learners toward preventive strategies and corrective behaviours
Grounded in SAP’s contemporary best practices for ECC, S/4HANA, and cloud-integrated landscapes. -
Cultivate a habit of reflective, responsible ABAP engineering
Ensuring that technical skill is inseparable from system stewardship.
By the end of this program, learners will emerge not just as stronger ABAP developers, but as professionals capable of safeguarding the digital integrity, performance, and compliance posture of entire organisations.
¶ Why This Knowledge Matters More Today than Ever Before
SAP landscapes are experiencing unprecedented transformation. Organisations are migrating to S/4HANA, embracing cloud-driven integration, and connecting SAP with analytics platforms, mobile apps, AI engines, and partner systems. These transitions have expanded the “attack surface” and increased operational complexity. A single overlooked vulnerability in ABAP code can now ripple across hybrid systems and cloud-enabled processes.
Industry surveys increasingly reveal that internal system misconfigurations and custom code vulnerabilities often carry as much risk as external cyberattacks. Many SAP breaches, performance failures, and operational disruptions stem from development choices hidden deep within custom ABAP objects—choices that seemed trivial at the time of their creation.
Understanding ABAP crimes is therefore not a specialised niche. It is a core discipline for all practitioners involved in SAP implementation, maintenance, architecture, audit, and governance.
¶ Towards a Culture of Clean, Secure, and Ethical ABAP
The vision that shapes this course is simple yet profound: to foster a global community of ABAP practitioners who understand that code is not merely written—it is inherited, trusted, and depended upon by thousands of users.
Clean ABAP is not simply elegant syntax; it is an ethical commitment. Secure ABAP is not merely a preventative measure; it is a professional obligation. Compliant ABAP is not just an audit requirement; it is evidence of integrity.
As you progress through these hundred articles, you will gain insights that bridge technology with responsibility. You will develop an intuition for identifying risk before it materialises, recognising misuse before it metastasises, and designing systems that embody stability, transparency, and trust.
This course invites you into an intellectual and professional journey that blends the technical with the philosophical, the practical with the reflective, and the corrective with the aspirational. It acknowledges the mistakes of the past, interrogates the challenges of the present, and prepares you to build SAP landscapes worthy of the emerging future.
¶ SAP ABAP crimes
100 Chapters: Secure ABAP Coding Practices (Beginner to Advanced)
I. Foundations of Secure ABAP (1-10)
1. Introduction to Secure Software Development
2. The Importance of Security in ABAP Development
3. Common ABAP Vulnerabilities: An Overview
4. Understanding Input Validation and Sanitization
5. Secure Coding Principles: Defense in Depth
6. The OWASP Top 10 for ABAP
7. Secure Development Lifecycle for ABAP
8. Setting up a Secure ABAP Development Environment
9. Basic Security Testing Techniques
10. Introduction to Static Code Analysis Tools
II. Input Validation and Sanitization (11-25)
11. Validating User Input: Data Type Checks
12. Length Restrictions and Range Checks
13. Character Set Validation and Encoding
14. Regular Expressions for Input Validation
15. Whitelisting vs. Blacklisting Input
16. Escaping Special Characters for SQL Queries
17. Preventing SQL Injection Attacks
18. Handling User Input in ALV Reports
19. Secure File Uploads and Downloads
20. Validating Input from External Systems (RFCs, APIs)
21. Context-Aware Input Validation
22. Using ABAP's Built-in Validation Functions
23. Implementing Custom Validation Routines
24. Best Practices for Input Validation
25. Advanced Input Sanitization Techniques
III. Authorization and Authentication (26-40)
26. Understanding SAP Authorization Concepts
27. Working with Authorization Objects and Profiles
28. Implementing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
29. Secure User Authentication Methods
30. Handling User Sessions and Timeouts
31. Protecting Sensitive Data with Authorizations
32. Implementing Authorization Checks in ABAP Code
33. Preventing Privilege Escalation Attacks
34. Securely Managing User Credentials
35. Auditing and Logging Authorization-Related Events
36. Secure Communication between Systems (RFCs, HTTPS)
37. Implementing Single Sign-On (SSO)
38. Best Practices for Authorization Management
39. Securely Handling Passwords
40. Two-Factor Authentication in ABAP
IV. Error Handling and Logging (41-55)
41. Secure Error Handling Practices
42. Preventing Information Leakage through Error Messages
43. Logging Security-Relevant Events
44. Centralized Logging and Monitoring
45. Using System Logs for Security Analysis
46. Implementing Custom Logging Functions
47. Securely Handling Exceptions
48. Preventing Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attacks
49. Input Validation and Error Handling
50. Best Practices for Error Handling and Logging
51. Securely Displaying Error Messages to Users
52. Handling Runtime Errors Securely
53. Using the Security Audit Log
54. Analyzing Security Logs
55. Integrating Security Logging with SIEM systems
V. Secure Coding Techniques (56-75)
56. Secure Data Handling in ABAP Programs
57. Preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks
58. Secure Output Encoding
59. Using Prepared Statements for Database Access
60. Avoiding Dynamic SQL Statements
61. Securely Handling Internal Tables
62. Preventing Buffer Overflow Attacks
63. Securely Working with Memory
64. Code Reviews for Security
65. Static Code Analysis and Security Checks
66. Secure Development Guidelines and Standards
67. Secure Coding for Web Dynpro ABAP
68. Secure Coding for SAPUI5 Applications
69. Securely Integrating with External Systems
70. Best Practices for Secure ABAP Development
71. Securely Handling File Operations
72. Preventing Path Traversal Attacks
73. Securely Using Function Modules
74. Securely Handling Variants
75. Securely Using Classes and Methods
VI. Advanced Security Topics (76-90)
76. Security Testing Methodologies (Penetration Testing)
77. Vulnerability Scanning and Remediation
78. Security Auditing and Compliance
79. Secure Configuration of SAP Systems
80. Security Hardening of ABAP Applications
81. Incident Response and Handling Security Breaches
82. Security Awareness Training for ABAP Developers
83. Managing Security Risks in ABAP Development
84. Secure Development for Mobile Applications
85. Security Considerations for Cloud-Based ABAP Development
86. Secure ABAP Development in S/4HANA
87. Integrating Security Tools with ABAP Development
88. Security Best Practices for SAP Fiori
89. Secure Development for SAP Cloud Platform
90. Advanced Threat Modeling for ABAP Applications
VII. Case Studies and Best Practices (91-100)
91. Real-World Security Vulnerabilities in ABAP
92. Case Studies of Secure ABAP Implementations
93. Best Practices for Secure ABAP Development Projects
94. Security Checklists for ABAP Code Reviews
95. Secure ABAP Development Tools and Resources
96. Building a Secure ABAP Development Culture
97. Security Testing Tools and Techniques
98. Automating Security Testing in ABAP
99. Continuous Security Integration in ABAP
100. The Future of Secure ABAP Development