What Is Application Security Testing?

What is Application Security Testing?

Application Security Testing is the practice of scanning various aspects of an application throughout its development lifecycle for the purpose of uncovering and remediating known vulnerabilities, thus strengthening the application’s security posture.

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Application Security Testing is an essential part of DevSecOps, which is the practice of seamlessly integrating security tools, technologies, and practices throughout the entire software development lifecycle and shifting them left in order to address security vulnerabilities as early as possible. Application security tests are executed by security scanners that are configured to analyze different aspects of the application and report on any vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

Types of Application Security Tests

There are several different types of application security tests that should be run throughout the software development lifecycle:

‍SAST (Static Application Security Testing) Scanners

Static application security testing (SAST) involves analyzing application source code to detect security vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited. SAST is applied early in the SLDC, prior to code being compiled. SAST scanners should be run on code on a regular basis, such as during periodic builds, at each code check-in, or during a code release. Catching and fixing vulnerabilities in the code base at an early stage has a dramatic impact on the quality and security posture of the final application.

‍SCA (Software Composition Analysis)

SCA tools are used to identify open source software within a code base, for the purpose of evaluating security, license compliance and overall code quality. As the vast majority of modern applications are built with open source software components, it is very important to be aware not only of the inherent security risks associated with a particular artifact, but also of licensing considerations regarding the use of that artifact or library.

‍Secret Detection

Sensitive information can be exposed through various means, such as through unsecured code, leaked code repositories, or unencrypted communication channels. Secret scanning is the practice of running automated scans on code repositories, execution pipelines, configuration files, commits, and other data sources to identify security vulnerabilities related to exposed secrets.

‍Container Scanning

A rapidly-growing number of modern applications are built as collections of small composable elements called containers. A container packages up a short piece of code– the container image– along with all of its dependencies, binaries, and libraries. Container scanning tools are purpose built to analyze containers and their contents for known security issues. 

‍DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) Scanners

Dynamic application security testing involves analyzing running applications. This methodology applies mainly to web applications and services and is used to find run-time vulnerabilities and environment-related issues.

‍IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing)

IAST is an application security testing method that tests an application while the application is run by an automated test, a human tester, or any activity “interacting” with the application functionality. At the core of the IAST tool are sensor modules which track application behavior while the interactive tests are running. Alerts are generated if a vulnerability is detected.

Benefits of Application Security Testing

The main advantage for running SAST, SCA, Container, DAST, and IAST scans is that it allows developers, DevOps teams and application security teams to discover and fix any known security vulnerabilities before an application makes it to production. Detected vulnerabilities can be prioritized by severity and then remediated by software developers, in collaboration with security teams.

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Application Security Testing: Best Practices

Shift Application Security Testing Left

As part of an effective DevSecOps program, it is critical to run application security tests as early on in the software development life cycle as possible, which enables developers and security engineers to detect and fix security vulnerabilities with the least amount of disruption and toil.

Automate Application Security Testing

Reduce the amount of manual operations and automate application security testing where possible. Integrating security scanners with a software development platform and automatically running them within build and deploy pipelines is highly recommended.

Feed Clear And Actionable Vulnerability Information To Developers

In order for shift left security to be effective, developers need to be able to act fast and remediate vulnerabilities with as little toil as possible. The use of multiple security scanners often produces a mountain of vulnerability data which must be deduplicated and prioritized in order for developers to immediately begin remediating them.

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Take Application Security Testing to the Next Level With Harness STO

Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO) is shift-left security built for your CI/CD pipelines and designed for developers. With Harness STO, you can seamlessly integrate security scanners and orchestrate application security tests anywhere across your build pipelines and enable developers to rapidly remediate vulnerabilities through intelligent prioritization and deduplication, and AI-driven remediation guidance.

Learn more about how the Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO) module can help you shift application security testing left and accelerate vulnerability remediation without toil.