Top 5 Tools to Consider For Application Security Testing

Security has become the single largest challenge for the digital enterprises to grapple with. The reason for this is not hard to find, as about 75% of all breaches are found to take place due to the misconfiguration of applications, especially at their end points (Source: https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2753017.) Loss of revenue due to the security breaches is equally high. For, according to the BI intelligence report of 2016, the total revenue loss on account of mobile app frauds stood at a whopping $350 million. Given the enormity of the challenge, businesses have no option but to invest in strengthening the security aspect of the applications through rigorous application security testing.

What happens if application security testing is not done?

• It severely compromises the quality of the application and leaves users at the mercy of the hackers and cyber criminals. The growing number of frauds and security breaches are a testimony to the threat.

• The applications can be easily infected with malware, viruses, and trojans. This can not only undermine the functioning of the applications but worse, can lead to the siphoning of sensitive information and money.

• Customer’s trust in the application and by consequence, the business is eroded. This can result in business loss in terms of brand image and ROI.

• Businesses incurring additional costs to secure the application(s) post the breach.

• Enterprises inviting lawsuits from affected customers.

• Enterprises falling foul of the regulatory agencies and inviting strictures, penalties or an outright ban.

In the Agile or DevOps environment, carrying out application security testing should be alongside the development process. This is to ensure a better identification of bugs, faster time to market and an improved customer experience. The application security testing methodology can differ in its scope and objectives. The security testing of applications encompasses three types of methodologies -

Tiger Box: The methodology requires the security testing experts to hack into the application or software to find out the loopholes.

Black Box: The methodology involves the testing of the network and its various aspects. It includes the testing of the firewalls as well.

Grey Box: The methodology combines both white and black box testing to identify the structural vulnerabilities of an application.

In addition to following the above mentioned application security testing methodologies, security testing specialist use many tools as well. Below mentioned are the top 5 security testing tools that help testing experts to identify the vulnerabilities and validate the application.

Top 5 tools

#1 Network Mapper or NMAP: The tool checks for the vulnerabilities existing in the network of a business enterprise. With a built-in feature to automate the testing process, the open source tool creates a virtual map of the entire network and identifies the vulnerable areas. It uses raw data packets to determine the network hosts, services provided by the hosts, and the OS and type of firewalls used by the hosts.

URL: https://nmap.org/

#2 Metasploit: This popular open source tool or framework is used by certified ethical hackers as well as a large number of security testing experts. Built on the PERL platform, this integrated architecture of many Pen tools helps to launch cyberattacks from various access points. Armed with a ‘Meterpreter’ the tool flags the results after a vulnerability is breached. The results can be suitably interpreted to develop further test strategies.

URL: https://www.metasploit.com/

#3 Wireshark: The tool helps to identify the weaknesses of an application in real time by analyzing its traffic. It provides an easy to understand report and a colour coding scheme. The latter can help testers to investigate the loopholes further or isolate the erring data packet. The tool also helps to identify the threats such as SQL injection, memory buffer overflows, and data parameter pollution among others.

URL: http://www.wireshark.org/

#4 Vega: This GUI enabled testing platform based on Java comes with an automated scanner and proxy. It helps to identify threats such as cross site scripting, SQL injection, and header injection among others.

URL: https://subgraph.com/vega/

#5 Iron Wasp: Capable of generating HTML and RTF reports, this Python and Ruby based tool can detect a large number of vulnerabilities including false positives and negatives.

URL: https://ironwasp.org/

Conclusion

The changing risks landscape in terms of cybersecurity implies that testing tools should incorporate newer methodologies to identify any emerging vulnerability. The use of these tools helps to conduct a security audit and to enhance the quality of an application – the prerequisite to a better user experience.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.