What is Security Testing?

• Security testing checks whether the software is vulnerable to cyber attacks,
• Tests the impact of malicious or unexpected inputs on its operations.
• Security testing provides evidence that systems and information are safe and reliable and that they do not accept unauthorized inputs.
• Security testing is a type of non-functional testing. Unlike functional testing,
• which focuses on whether the software’s functions are working properly (“what” the software does),
• non-functional testing focuses on whether the application is designed and configured correctly
• (“how” it does it).

Main goals of security testing:

• Identify assets—things that need to be protected, such as software applications and computing infrastructure.
• Identify threats and vulnerabilities – activities that can cause damage to an asset or weaknesses in one or more assets that can be exploited by attackers.
• Identify risk—security testing aims to evaluate the risk that specific threats or vulnerabilities will hurt the business. Risk is evaluated by identifying the severity of a threat or vulnerability, and the likelihood and impact of exploitation.
• Perform remediation—security testing is not just a passive evaluation of assets. It provides actionable guidance for remediating vulnerabilities discovered and can verify that vulnerabilities were successfully fixed.

Key principles of security testing

Security testing aims to ensure that an organization’s systems, applications, and data uphold the following security principles:

• Confidentiality – limiting access to sensitive access managed by a system.
• Integrity – ensuring that data is consistent, accurate, and trustworthy throughout its lifecycle and cannot be modified by unauthorized entities.
• Authentication– ensuring sensitive systems or data are protected by a mechanism that verifies the identity of the individual accessing them.
• Authorization – ensuring sensitive systems or data properly control access for authenticated users according to their roles or permissions.
• Availability – ensuring that critical systems or data are available for their users when they are needed.
• Non-repudiation – ensures that data sent or received cannot be denied, by exchanging authentication information with a provable time stamp.

Types Of Security Testing

Penetration Testing (Ethical Hacking)

Penetration testing is the process of stimulating real-life cyber attacks against an application, software, system, or network under safe conditions. It can help evaluate how existing security measures will measure up in a real attack. Most importantly, penetration testing can find unknown vulnerabilities, including zero-day threats and business logic vulnerabilities. Penetration testing was traditionally done manually by a trusted and certified security professional known as an ethical hacker. The hacker works under an agreed scope, attempting to breach a company’s systems in a controlled manner, without causing damage. In recent years, automated penetration testing tools have helped organizations achieve similar benefits at lower costs and with higher testing frequency.

Application Security Testing (AST)

Application security testing describes methods organizations can use to find and eliminate vulnerabilities in software applications. These methods involve testing, analyzing, and reporting on the security posture of a software application throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

The main goal of AST is to prevent software vulnerabilities before applications are released to the market, and failing that, quickly identify and remediate them in production. Successful AST results in more robust, secure source code, greater visibility over application security issues, and improved protection against internal and external threats.

Web Application Security Testing

The goal of web application security testing is to determine whether a web application is vulnerable to attack. It covers a variety of automatic and manual techniques. Web application penetration testing aims to gather information about a web application, discover system vulnerabilities or flaws, investigate the success of exploiting these flaws or vulnerabilities, and evaluate the risk of web application vulnerabilities.
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a community dedicated to discovering and reporting security vulnerabilities in web applications.

API Security Testing

API security testing helps identify vulnerabilities in application programming interfaces (APIs) and web services and assists developers in remediating those vulnerabilities. APIs provide access to sensitive data, and attackers can use them as an entry point to internal systems. Testing APIs rigorously and regularly can protect them from unauthorized access and abuse. APIs are especially vulnerable to threats like man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks, in which attackers can eavesdrop on API communications and steal data or credentials, API injections, in which attackers can inject malicious code into internal systems, and denial of service (DoS), in which attackers flood APIs with fake traffic to deny service to legitimate users. To mitigate these threats, an API must be verified to have strong authentication of user requests, authorization of users by the principle of least privilege, encryption of all communication using SSL/TLS, and sanitization of user inputs to prevent code injection and tampering.

Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management is a continuous process that enables an organization to identify, assess, report, manage, and remediate security vulnerabilities across endpoints, workloads, and networks. Security teams typically use vulnerability scanning tools to detect vulnerabilities and implement manual or automatic processes to fix them.

A robust vulnerability management program uses threat intelligence and leverages IT operations knowledge to understand the real business impact of vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and remediate high-priority vulnerabilities as quickly as possible.

Configuration Scanning

Security scanning, also known as configuration scanning, is the process of identifying misconfigurations of software, networks, and other computing systems. This type of scanning typically checks systems against a list of best practices, specified by research organizations or compliance standards.

Automated configuration scanning tools identify misconfigurations, and provide a report with more details on each misconfiguration, with suggestions on how to resolve them.

Security Audits

A security audit is a structured process for reviewing/auditing an application/software according to a defined standard. Audits usually involve reviews of code or architectures in light of security requirements, analyzing security gaps, and assessing the security posture of hardware configurations, operating systems, and organizational practices. It also evaluates compliance with regulations and compliance standards.

Risk Assessment

Risk assessment allows an organization to identify, analyze, and classify the security risks faced by its business-critical assets. A risk assessment can help understand what are the most important threats to an organization’s infrastructure, and prioritize remediation of systems. It can also help with long-term planning and budgeting of security investments.

Security Posture Assessment

A security posture assessment combines security scans, ethical hacking, and risk assessment to identify not only the risks facing an organization but also its current security controls and how effective they are. It can identify gaps in the current security posture, and recommend changes or improvements that will improve security for protected assets.

Security Testing Approaches

• Black Box Testing
• White Box Testing
• Gray Box Testing
• Data Security Testing
• Data Security Audits
• Compliance Testing
• Cloud Native Security Testing
   

Security Testing with CyberCrocs

CyberCrocs Security helps address the shortage of security personnel, enabling AppSec teams to provide governance for security testing, and enabling every developer to run their security tests.

- Test results are provided to the CISO and the security team, providing complete visibility into vulnerabilities found and remediated
- Tickets are automatically opened for developers in their bug tracking system so they can be fixed quickly

Every security finding is automatically validated, removing false positives and the need for manual validation CyberCrocs Security can scan any target, whether Web Apps or APIs (REST/SOAP/GraphQL) to help enhance DevSecOps and achieve regulatory compliance with our real-time, false positive free actionable reports of vulnerabilities.

In the future, our ML-based Security Testing solution will provide an automated solution to identify Business Logic Vulnerabilities.

Get your Security Testing Training done by Cyber Crocs

For any queries or further information related to our services, please feel free to contact us at info@qacamail.com or call us at +919599619392. We are here to assist you!