What is Application Security Testing?
Surrounded by software businesses today, organizations rely on their networking operations. The safety and security of these software is critical in minimizing business from falling prey to cyber attacks that cause financial and reputational crippling. It is vital to have a robust application security strategy in place to lower business risks and enable them to build a trust in the security of your software.
Application security is of many forms, such as – Mobile, Cloud and and Web. They strive towards the same goal: to identify, mitigate and prevent vulnerabilities. They differ in where, how, and when security testing, practices, and methodologies take place. It is the process of detecting, restoring, and improving security practices to safeguard applications from potential threats, throughout their entire lifecycle. Application security assists organisations in defending all types of applications such as legacy, desktop, web, mobile.
Application security testing can be broadly classified into two.
SAST( Static Application Security Testing)
DAST( Dynamic Application Security Testing)
When should application security testing be performed?
Security testing needs vary according to time, business models and environment. Nevertheless, with the introduction of DevSecOps, testing is encouraged even at an early stage, i.e. during the Software Development Life Cycle. Security best practices are to be feasible and efficient enough to detect vulnerabilities at an early stage in the process of building an application, so that they can be remediated before they become a bigger problem that costs time, money, and rework efforts later.
What tools are used for Application Security Testing?
There are a wide range of Application Security tools. Each of which are used for a specific case and function. Some of the most common include:
Static Application Security Testing
Static application security testing (SAST), also known as static analysis, is a methodology that analyses source code. It identifies security flaws that make applications vulnerable to attack. SAST inspects an application before the compilation. It’s also referred to as white box testing. The advantages and disadvantages of Static Application Security Testing (SAST) are listed below.
Fixing vulnerabilities is less expensive because it occurs at the beginning of the process.
Provides real-time feedback as well as graphical representations of the hindrances discovered.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) helps identify the precise location of the faulty code and the vulnerabilities.
Customised reports that can be exported and tracked using readily accessible dashboards.
Dynamic Application Security Testing
Focuses on what's exploitable and covers all components to provide a holistic perspective of application security (server, custom code, open-source, services)
It can be incorporated into the development, quality assurance, and production to provide a continuous, holistic perspective.
The dynamic analysis allows for a more comprehensive approach to managing portfolio risk (thousands of apps) and can even scan legacy apps as part of risk management.
Functional app testing, unlike SAST, is not language bound, allowing for the detection of runtime and environment-related errors.
DAST simulates controlled attacks on a web application or service to detect security flaws in a running environment. It evaluates items during operation and provides feedback on compliance and general security issues. DAST is also referred to as “black-box” tools. These tools are utilised in the SDLC testing and quality assurance phases.
Penetration Testing
This manual application security testing is best for critical applications.
It is suitable for undergoing major changes.
The assessment involves adversary-based testing to discover advanced attack scenarios.
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)
IAS testing searches for known vulnerabilities inside the application’s functions
It simulates various scenarios in which a user runs or interacts with the application.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
SCA analyzes the libraries in an application for their origin.
As popular open-source software libraries often consists of public bugs, this is a form of analysis that has proven to be very effective in debugging the application.