What is Security Testing?
Security testing with a security focus identifies risks, dangers, and weaknesses in software applications and guards against nefarious intrusions. The goal of security tests is to find any flaws or vulnerabilities in the software system that could allow workers or outsiders to steal information, money, or reputation from the organization.
Why Security Testing is Important?
The fundamental objective of security testing is to determine the system’s risks and assess any potential vulnerability so that threats can be encountered and the system can continue to operate without being compromised. Also, it aids in identifying any security vulnerabilities that might be present in the system and enables programmers to solve issues.
Types of Security Testing in Software Testing:
According to the Open Source Security Testing methodology document, there are seven primary forms of security testing. They are described in detail below:
Vulnerability scanning: involves checking a system for known vulnerability signs using automated software.
Security scanning: entails locating system and network flaws and offering remedies to lower the risks. Both manual and automated scanning can use this scanning.
Penetration testing: This type of testing mimics a malicious hacker’s attack. This testing entails analyzing a specific system to look for any potential openings for an outside hacking attack.
Risk Assessment: This test analyses security risks that have been noticed in the organization. There are three levels of risk: Low, Medium, and High. This testing suggests safeguards and precautions lower the danger.
Ethical Hacking: An organization’s software systems are considered ethical hacking. Instead of stealing for their personal advantage as hostile hackers do, this hacker’s goal is to reveal system security holes.
Posture Assessment: An organization’s total security posture is shown by a posture assessment, which incorporates security scanning, ethical hacking, and risk assessments.
How to do Security Testing?
It is universally acknowledged that delaying security testing until after the software implementation phase or after deployment would increase costs. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate security testing into the SDLC life cycle at an early stage.
The test plan should include:
- Security-related test cases or scenarios
- Test Data related to security testing
- Test Tools required for security testing
- Analysis of various tests outputs from different security tools
Example Test Scenarios for Security Testing:
- Passwords ought to be stored in encrypted form.
- Applications and systems shouldn’t permit unauthorized users.
- Examine the cookies and application session time.
- The back button on the browser shouldn’t function on financial websites.
Security Testing Tools:
1. Acunetix:
Acunetix by Invicti, which is intuitive and straightforward to use, assists small and medium-sized businesses in making sure that their web applications are safe against expensive data breaches. It accomplishes this by identifying a variety of web security problems and assisting security and development experts in taking quick action to fix them.
Features:
- Powerful web vulnerability assessment for more than 7,000 issues, including OWASP Top 10 issues like SQLi and XSS
- Using automated online asset discovery to find websites that have been neglected or abandoned
- A sophisticated crawler for the most complicated online applications, including sections with multiple forms and password protection
- Application security testing that is interactive and dynamic is combined to find flaws other technologies miss.
- Evidence of exploitation is offered for numerous types of flaws
- Integrations with well-known issue tracking and CI/CD platforms enable DevOps automation.
- Reporting on compliance with regulatory requirements, including PCI DSS, NIST, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and others.
2. Intruder:
A strong, automated penetration testing tool called Intruder finds security flaws throughout your IT system. Intruder protects organizations of all sizes from hackers by providing industry-leading security assessments, ongoing monitoring, and an intuitive interface.
Features:
- with over 10,000 security tests and best-in-class threat coverage
- checks for application weaknesses (such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting) as well as configuration flaws, missing fixes, and other issues.
- Results from scans are automatically prioritized and analyzed.
- Simple UI that is quick to set up and use for your initial scans
- and proactive monitoring of security for new vulnerabilities
- Integration of the Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud connectors API with your CI/CD pipeline
3. Owasp:
In order to increase the security of software, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) was founded. To pen-test diverse software environments and protocols, the project has a number of tools available. The project’s flagship instruments include.
4. WireShark:
A network analysis tool called Wireshark was once known as Ethereal. This real-time packet captures and displays them in a readable fashion for humans. It functions essentially as a network packet analyzer, providing minute details about your network protocols, packet information, etc. It is open source and is compatible with many different operating systems, including Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris, NetBSD, and FreeBSD. A GUI or the TTY mode of the TShark Utility can be used to see the information that is retrieved using this utility.
5. W3af:
A web application attack and audit framework is called w3af. It features three different sorts of plugins: attack, audit, and discovery. For instance, a discovery plugin in w3af searches for various URLs to test for vulnerabilities and passes the information along to the audit plugin, which uses the URLs to search for flaws.
