Dynamic Application security testing

 

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

DAST is also a very crucial application security testing procedure. It works in a way that can investigate applications while they are running to detect security vulnerabilities. It is a fact that the vulnerabilities and threats are growing at a rapid scale and this is the only reason why businesses consider deploying DAST.

Why is it necessary?

Now, though web applications suffer attacks as a major threat, these aren’t as deadly as ransomware. The most common way that web applications have security issues is via SQL injection.

The next common way hackers use to take advantage of the vulnerabilities is cross-site scripting. The hackers inject their codes in the web applications through which they steal confidential data, cookies, and credentials.

There are two different types of DAST testing. They are:

• 🕳  Automated DAST

DAST scanners are mostly activated by crawlers. Such crawlers use bots to scan through websites automatically and logs every page of the application. Further, the security testing setup audits the entire web application for any possible vulnerability. This audit even includes checking for brute force attacks too.

Now, such an automated DAST can detect many different kinds of vulnerabilities. 

• 🕳  Manual DAST

Automated DAST and or SAST are good for regular security checks. But context-based business logic vulnerabilities requires human intervention.

The tester has understood the context of the application and then create test cases to change the response manually that is exchanged between the browser and the server. This opens up a huge prospect of exploring all the vulnerabilities and working on mitigating them.

🕳  Static Application security testing