Application Security Testing

Application Security Testing (AST) includes all tasks that introduce a secure software development life cycle to development teams. Its final goal is to improve security practices and, through that, to find, fix and preferably prevent security issues within applications. It encompasses the whole application life cycle from requirements analysis, design, implementation, verification as well as maintenance.

Security testing techniques scour for vulnerabilities or security holes in applications. These vulnerabilities leave applications open to exploitation. Ideally, security testing is implemented throughout the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) so that vulnerabilities may be addressed in a timely and thorough manner.

There are many kinds of automated tools for identifying vulnerabilities in applications. Common tool categories used for identifying application vulnerabilities include:

• Static Application Security Testing (SAST); analyzes source code for security vulnerabilities during an application's development. Compared to DAST, SAST can be utilized even before the application is in an executable state. As SAST has access to the full source-code it is a white-box approach. This can yield more detailed results but can result in many false-positives that need to be manually verified.
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST); automatically detects vulnerabilities by crawling and analyzing web sites. This black-box scanning based method is highly scalable, easily integrated and quick. DAST tools are well suited for dealing with low-level attacks such as injection flaws but are not well suited to detect high-level flaws, e.g., logic or business-logic flaws.
• Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST); assesses applications from within using software instrumentation. This gray-box based approach combines the strengths of both SAST and DAST methods as well as providing access to code, HTTP traffic, library information, backend connections and configuration information. Some IAST products require the application to be attacked, while others can be used during normal quality assurance testing.
• Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST); fundamentally Mobile AST solutions test applications in 3 main ways: SAST: These solutions statically analyze the source, binary or bytecode of an application to identify vulnerabilities. Behavioral testing: Mobile AST solutions use behavioral analysis to observe the behavior of the app during runtime and identify actions that could be exploited by an attacker. DAST: These solutions also use dynamic analysis to test the app in its runtime state. DAST simulates attacks against an application and analyzes the application's reactions, determining whether it is vulnerable.

iSOC24 carries the Rapid7 solutions as well as the Synack Crowd Sourced Web Application testing services in its extensive portfolio.

Below we have described the functionality of both solutions more in-depth:

Rapid7 InsightAppSec

InsightAppSec is part of Rapid7's security suite, providing Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) for mature and maturing Application Security professionals. InsightAppSec provides comprehensive dynamic application security testing that continuously analyzes web applications for security vulnerabilities.

The key features include: a universal translator to enable IT security professionals to analyze complex applications; customized attack simulation capabilities that allow automatic testing of workflows such as shopping carts; scanning automation; attack replay, which allows replay of vulnerabilities in real time in order to verify that vulnerabilities are exploitable and that successful remediation has occurred; continuous site monitoring, which detects changes in application ecosystems and triggers a re-scan according to configurable settings; and integration with ticketing systems.

InsightAppSec enables integration with protection technologies to automatically generate web application firewalls (WAFs), which are custom rules that help to protect vulnerable applications while the vulnerabilities are being remediated.

Synack Crowd Sourced Web Application Testing services

For organizations with the need for performing Web Application Security Testing activities without the necessary resources iSOC24 offers the Synack services. The combination of a professional team consisting of worldwide presence of security specialists and the central management including using the Synack Red Team capacity offer a complete and highly skilled way of performing web application scans without using company resources.

The majority of successful organizational breaches (90%) and incidents (50%) happen on the web application layer. To protect against these attacks over time, enterprise application security testing must be integrated into the software development lifecycle (SLDC). Synack’s on-demand SaaS platform for crowdsourced security expertise allows for activation of a team of elite researchers to test web and mobile applications for damaging vulnerabilities and weaknesses on a continuous or point-in-time basis. The team utilizes standards like the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) and checks for potentially-serious vulnerabilities in applications like remote code execution, SQL injection, cross site scripting (XSS), and more.

As your applications grow, so too does the scope of your security needs and the pace at which you must test. To efficiently address your applications’ security needs in the development cycle, as well as to keep pace with the release of new code, your security team needs to be able to integrate findings into the development process and provide actionable feedback to developers.

Synack’s crowdsourced application testing services provide prioritized, actionable feedback on found vulnerabilities that enables immediate remediation. Synack provides an adversarial perspective on a continuous or point-in-time cadence that aligns to your development cycles. Synack scales up testing and deployment on demand to meet your DevSecOps needs. With the crowdsourced Web Application/Pentesting solution, the pool of researchers will provide customers with an order of magnitude more perspectives, approaches, and overall eyes.

If you would like to learn more about the Rapid7 and Synack propositions and how these can best fit in your situation please contact one of the specialists of iSOC24.