With the passage of time, technology is ingrained in every aspect which has made our lives relatively easy. But this easiness comes with a cost and that is security threats. There are always some people out there who are looking for loopholes in your application so that they can attack or hack your application. This is where software security testing comes in which aims to uncover vulnerabilities, threats, risks in the software application and prevents malicious attacks, loss of information, revenue or repute.
Why is Security Testing so important?
The main goal of Security Testing is to identify all the threats from the system so that it does not stop functioning or cannot be exploited. It helps developers to detect and fix all the problems. Most companies don’t have an in-house Security Testing team so they outsource this testing to Security Testing Company which have expert testers who make sure that there is no loophole left.
There are seven main types of Security Testing which we will cover here briefly:
Vulnerability Testing: This is done using automated software to scan the application against all the known and common vulnerabilities.
Penetration Scanning: This is an authorized attack on the system to find potential vulnerabilities. This simulates an attack from a malicious hacker so that all the loopholes can be found before any attack.
Security Auditing: This is an in-house audit of the application and usually involves line by line inspection of the code.
Ethical hacking: It’s hacking an Organization Software system. Unlike malicious hackers, who steal for their own gains, the intent is to expose security flaws in the system.
Posture Assessment: This combines Security scanning, Ethical Hacking and Risk Assessments to show an overall security posture of an organization.
Security Scanning: It involves identifying network and system weaknesses, and later provides solutions for reducing these risks. This scanning can be performed for both Manual and Automated scanning.
Risk Assessment: This testing involves analysis of security risks observed in the organization. Risks are classified as Low, Medium and High. This testing recommends controls and measures to reduce the risk.
Apart from these types of Security Testing, there are 3 methodologies that are most commonly used by a security testing company:
SAST (Static Application Security Testing)
Also known as “white box testing” has been around for more than a decade. It allows developers to find security vulnerabilities in the application source code earlier in the software development life cycle. It also ensures conformance to coding guidelines and standards without actually executing the underlying code.
DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)
Also known as “black box” testing, can find security vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a running application, typically web apps. It does that by employing fault injection techniques on an app, such as feeding malicious data to the software, to identify common security vulnerabilities, such as SQL Injection and cross-site scripting. DAST can also cast a spotlight on runtime problems that can’t be identified by static analysis for example, authentication and server configuration issues, as well as flaws visible only when a known user logs in.
IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing)
Because both SAST and DAST are older technologies, there are those who argue they lack what it takes to secure modern web and mobile apps. For example, SAST has a difficult time dealing with libraries and frameworks found in modern apps. That’s because static tools only see the application source code they can follow. What’s more, libraries and third-party components often cause static tools to choke, producing “lost sources” and “lost sinks” messages. The same is true for frameworks. Run a static tool on an API, web service or REST endpoint, and it won’t find anything wrong in them because it can’t understand the framework.