In today's fast-paced software development landscape, the number of application security testing tools available can feel overwhelming. For developers, it’s challenging to figure out which tools are best suited for identifying specific vulnerabilities in your applications. With so many options—like Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), and Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)—it can be tough to know which approach will address your particular security needs.

These testing methodologies are designed to help you uncover potential weaknesses in your code, functionality, and overall application behavior. Additionally, tools like Software Composition Analysis (SCA) are crucial for managing open-source components, which play a large role in modern development. By using the right combination of these strategies, you can ensure that vulnerabilities are detected and resolved well before your applications are deployed.

This blog discusses all the strategies and throws light on the scenarios where they are best suited.

What are the Benefits of Using AST Tools?

Application Security Testing (AST) tools are essential for developers who want to ensure the safety and integrity of their applications. Here are the key benefits of incorporating AST tools into your development process:

• Early Detection of Vulnerabilities

AST tools, especially Static Application Security Testing (SAST), help identify security flaws early in the development cycle. This allows you to address issues before they escalate, saving time and resources.

• Improved Code Quality

By continuously analyzing code for vulnerabilities, AST tools greatly improve the overall quality of your code. This results in fewer bugs and stronger, more secure applications.

• Compliance with Security Standards

AST tools help you ensure that your applications meet industry security standards and regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS. Compliance is an unskippable step for industries that handle sensitive data.

• Automated Security Testing

AST tools automate much of the security testing process, freeing developers from manual testing. Thus, it increases efficiency and reduces human error.

• Real-Time Feedback

Many AST tools provide real-time feedback during development. Thus, real-time feedback allows developers to fix issues immediately rather than waiting for post-deployment testing.

• Reduced Security Risks

By addressing vulnerabilities early and consistently, AST tools reduce the overall risk of security breaches. It enhances the security posture of your applications.

Types of Application Security Testing Tools

Here are some of the best application security testing tools.

1. Architecture and Design Security Tools

The architecture and design phase in application development is a critical stage that lays the foundation for how an application will function, interact with other systems, and meet business objectives. This phase typically follows the requirements gathering stage and is essential for ensuring that the application is built on a solid architectural framework.

Today, there are emerging automated security platforms that can embed security deep within the architecture and design phase. 

Platforms such as Seezo.io specialize in providing automated security design reviews for software features. It aims to deliver context-specific security requirements to developers before they begin coding, ensuring that security considerations are integrated into the development process from the outset.

2. Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Static application security testing (SAST), or static analysis, is a testing approach used to examine source code for security flaws that could expose your organization’s applications to potential threats. SAST performs this analysis before the code is compiled, identifying vulnerabilities early in the development process. This method is also known as white-box testing in the realm of application security testing tools.

SAST is implemented early in the software development life cycle (SDLC) since it doesn’t require a functioning application and can be performed without executing the code. It enables developers to detect vulnerabilities during the initial development stages, allowing them to address issues promptly without disrupting builds or allowing flaws to persist into the final release.

SAST tools provide developers with immediate feedback while coding, enabling them to fix problems before the code progresses to the next SDLC phase. This ensures security isn’t overlooked. Additionally, SAST tools offer visual representations of identified vulnerabilities, tracing them from source to sink.

Some tools can even triangulate the precise location of vulnerabilities and flag risky code segments. They also offer detailed recommendations on resolving these issues and indicate the most significant areas of coding that need fixes, all without requiring advanced security expertise.

With SAST tools, developers can generate tailored reports to export for offline use and monitor through dashboards. Organizing and tracking all reported security issues allows developers to address them swiftly, ensuring teams release applications with minimal defects. This approach supports the development of a secure software development life cycle (SDLC).

• Source Code Analyzers

Among SAST tools, there are source-code analyzers. They excel at evaluating the actual code written by developers. These tools scan the source code for common security flaws, such as improper input validation and hard-coded credentials, enabling developers to identify and rectify vulnerabilities early in the development process. By integrating source-code analysis into the software development lifecycle, it is possible to significantly reduce the risk of breaches and ensure that the applications are built on a solid foundation of secure coding practices.

• Binary and Byte-code Analyzers 

These tools focus on analyzing compiled code, which is crucial for identifying vulnerabilities that may not be apparent in the source code. Binary analyzers examine the executable files generated after compilation, while byte-code analyzers work on intermediate representations of code typically used in languages like Java. Both types of analyzers help uncover security weaknesses, such as buffer overflows and improper access controls, that could be exploited by attackers. 

3. Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) evaluates live applications through penetration testing to identify potential security vulnerabilities in what is known as the black box testing approach. It enables developers to identify applications' vulnerabilities without relying solely on their own knowledge. By integrating DAST into the software development life cycle (SDLC), developers can spot potential issues before the application is released. 

When SAST and DAST become a part of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Development pipeline, it is also known as DevSecOps.

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A dynamic application security testing tool examines a running application for vulnerabilities. It triggers automated alerts if it detects issues that could lead to attacks such as SQL injections, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and other exploits. Designed to operate in a dynamic environment, DAST tools can identify runtime vulnerabilities that SAST tools cannot detect.

One of the key techniques used in DAST is fuzzing, which involves sending unexpected or random inputs to the application to identify vulnerabilities. This technique helps simulate real-world attacks, uncovering how the application behaves under various input conditions. In addition to fuzzing, DAST also scans various aspects of the application, including query strings, requests, and responses, to identify potential security issues. This comprehensive approach allows security teams to detect vulnerabilities related to authentication, data handling, and other critical areas. 

4. Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)

Since SAST and DAST only offer a snapshot analysis (of a particular time in the development and deployment timeline), they cannot keep pace with the fast-moving agile software development lifecycle and the constantly shifting threat landscape. As a result, development, operations, and security teams often need to catch up while building, testing, and pushing software into production.

Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) addresses this challenge by combining the strengths of both static and dynamic testing methods. IAST creates a synergistic, self-improving approach that can analyze more code, deliver more accurate results, and validate a broader range of security rules faster than SAST or DAST tools can do individually.

IAST has a distinct advantage when it comes to false positives. Traditional security tools often overwhelm limited security resources with their high occurrence of false positives, complicating the process of identifying critical vulnerabilities. In contrast, IAST's real-time insights and continuous monitoring ensure the detection and resolution of vulnerabilities with minimal false positives or negatives, providing a more accurate and efficient approach to application security.

IAST uses agents and sensors to continuously monitor and analyze applications from the inside while they are running. These tools are self-learning and provide real-time analysis during the development and testing phases. These qualities make IAST tools particularly suited for Agile and DevOps environments, as they allow IT teams to detect and fix security vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle when mitigation can be faster and is more cost-effective.

5. Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Over 50% of the code in modern applications consists of open-source components. In the race for competitive advantage, reaching the market quickly is crucial, and software engineers leverage open-source elements to speed up development.Software Composition Analysis (or SCA) is an automated method for identifying open-source components (and libraries) within a codebase. It detects licenses in dependencies and associated vulnerabilities, aiding in risk and compliance evaluations. 

It can also produce a software bill of materials (SBOM) that can be shared with internal teams and external clients. SBOMs can also be compared against a variety of databases, including the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and  Vulnerability Database (VulnDB) to uncover weaknesses. With this information, developers can address potential issues before attackers exploit them. An effective SCA tool goes beyond package managers, examining infrastructure as code (IaC) and Kubernetes manifests and analyzing images to uncover vulnerabilities.

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SCA tools that integrate with IaC templates and offer comprehensive dependency scanning ensure that teams can identify and address vulnerabilities promptly. 

For instance, in Python, the SBOM would list all imported packages, like httplib2, in addition to their version numbers, identified vulnerabilities, and respective licenses for each package used. 

While designing SCA, teams should ensure full-fledged collaboration among stakeholders such as DevOps, engineering, security, and compliance teams. Many organizations utilize SCA tools to generate alerts or prevent code from being merged into repositories if it contains open-source components that breach the organization's compliance requirements for managing risk. Thus, establishing acceptable vulnerability stringency and license types should be a collaborative process in the application security software environment, involving all key stakeholders.

6. Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST)

Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST) involves the usage of application security testing tools that detect potential security vulnerabilities in mobile apps. Certain tools also offer guidance on how to address the identified risks, minimizing security threats. MAST can be conducted either manually or via automated tools, employing a range of techniques to ensure comprehensive security evaluation.

The techniques can be broadly segregated into static analysis, dynamic analysis, and forensic analysis. They are not mutually exclusive and more often than not, there is overlapping between them.

• Static Analysis

Static analysis tests the app’s source code, binary files, and other resources to detect security vulnerabilities. This process employs various automated techniques to assess the app without executing its code, allowing for early detection of potential issues.

• Dynamic Analysis

On the other hand, dynamic analysis evaluates the application while it is running, either on an actual device or within an emulator. This approach effectively uncovers vulnerabilities that only become apparent during execution, such as communication between the app and a server.

• Forensic Analysis

This method of dynamic analysis evaluates an application while it is being operated by a human tester, an automated test or any activity interacting with its features. The application is instrumented during this process, enabling a more thorough examination and deeper insight into its behavior and security vulnerabilities while it runs.

MAST addresses the unique challenges and threats associated with mobile platforms, such as:

1. Jailbreaking and Rooting: MAST checks for the presence of jailbroken or rooted devices, which can bypass security controls and increase the risk of data breaches and malware infections.

2. Data Leakage: MAST examines mobile apps for potential data leakage issues, ensuring that sensitive information is not exposed through insecure storage, transmission, or sharing.

3. OWASP Mobile Top 10: MAST aligns with the OWASP Mobile Security Project, identifying the top 10 most critical security risks in the application security software arena. It includes issues like insecure data storage, poor authentication, and insecure communication.

7. Database Security

Database security comprises a set of tools, controls, and measures to ensure a database's integrity, availability, and confidentiality. Confidentiality, often the target of data breaches, is a critical aspect. Effective database security must safeguard the following components: the data within the database, the database management system (DBMS), any connected applications, the physical or virtual database server, the underlying hardware, and the network or computing infrastructure that provides access to the database. Ensuring the protection of these elements is vital to maintaining a secure database environment.

Listed below are the best practices to improve the security of sensitive databases.

• Active Management of Passwords and User Access

For large organizations, it is essential to consider automating access management through password management or access control software. These solutions grant authorized users temporary passwords with the necessary permissions each time they need access to a database. Additionally, they track all activities performed during the access period and prevent administrators from sharing passwords, ensuring better security and accountability.

• Real-Time Database Monitoring

Regularly scanning your database for potential breach attempts enhances security and enables a swift response to potential attacks. One effective tool is File Integrity Monitoring (FIM), which tracks and logs all actions on the database server, alerting teams to suspicious activity.

• Web Application and Database Firewalls

To safeguard a database server from security threats, implementing a firewall is essential. Firewalls, by default, block unauthorized traffic and should also prevent your database from initiating outbound connections unless explicitly required. In addition to a standard firewall, deploying a web application firewall (WAF) can prove to be a force multiplier. This is because attacks targeting web applications, such as SQL injection, can be used to unlawfully access your databases. The combined use of both firewalls provides an extra layer of defense against potential threats.

How Should You Select The Right AST Tool?

The sheer number of application testing tools is enough to overwhelm anyone. Not all AST tools are identical, and choosing the suitable one can be challenging. Here are some critical factors to consider while you evaluate and select an AST tool.

Effectiveness

Does the tool cover all your needs? Can it handle JavaScript-heavy SPAs, perform thorough scans, and adapt to fit your unique applications? Ensure it can perform verified scans and sync with your environment.

Accuracy

If the tool's results aren’t reliable, developers and security engineers may need to manually verify them, which can be costly and time-consuming. Look for features like proof-based scanning to minimize false positives.

Deployability

Many organizations need help with implementing security tools after purchasing them. Select a tool that can be deployed quickly, ideally within a few days or hours.

Visibility and Flexibility

Some tools cover only limited areas of the attack surface. For instance, SAST tools are often confined to specific languages or code environments. Ensure the tool can be integrated into your vulnerability management system and supports the security needs of your entire organization.

Workflow Integration

AST tools should fit seamlessly into your development workflows. Choose a tool that integrates smoothly with your existing processes and toolchains and can run tests throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Conclusive Thoughts

In conclusion, selecting the right application security testing tool is crucial for addressing specific security needs. 

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) identifies vulnerabilities early in the code, while Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) focuses on runtime vulnerabilities. Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) combines the strengths of both, offering real-time, continuous monitoring. Additionally, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) ensures that open-source components are secure, and Mobile Application Security Testing (MAST) tackles platform-specific threats. But, it is always the best approach if you can incorporate security from the very beginning with an Architecture & Design Security Tool (ADST).

Seezo.io enhances security testing by offering a robust platform that specializes in providing automated security design reviews for software features. Delivering context-specific security requirements to developers, the platform ensures that security flags are blended into the development process from the very beginning.

Ready to strengthen your app's security? Sign up for Seezo today and protect your applications with an enhanced security posture. Don’t wait — book a demo now!