What Are Different Strategies for Security Testing?

In this modern interconnected world, the software application is considered the “front door” for several people worldwide through which to enter into your business. This assists enterprises to reach broad audiences and gives them the chance to rapidly grow their overall business. However, such development of technology increases the cloud, the Internet of things (IoT), web software product’s intricacy and enhanced the possible threats to hackers from varied endpoints with the system. Each year SMEs to reputable companies also face myriad type software security problems and these incidents straight impacted the brand reputation, business, and client trust in the software products.

In the current era companies are started expending extra resources, costs, and time to make Software Security Testing Services the number one IT (Information technology) priority. In software testing services, varied types of security testing have to be done before the app reach the planned end users, lie security scanning, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, security auditing, risk assessment, posture assessment, and ethical hacking. Software security testing comes under non-functional testing, in this method software tester test the app and confirm it is secured or not with varied possible attacks.

Software security plays a major role to manage and protect software app user’s personal data secured from hackers or attackers who breach the defenses of the software and exploit flaws in it. In software development, many times enterprises give less concern for security while developing the software owing to time constraints, low budgets, and lack of expert professionals.

The software security testing key objective is to determine all possible weakness and loopholes in the system before it starts used by the users. It is significant to consider the security tests in every single stage of the SDLC (Software development life cycle) and it is required to cover the authentication, integrity, authorization, availability, non-repudiation, and confidentiality of the system. So, to make software free from security issues, QA test engineers need to have a powerful and robust strategy for mitigating security threats. This article emphasizes the security challenges and security test strategy requires building in the software testing process.

Challenges of App Security Testing

• Detecting all the unintended functions of the code
• Tests using data app is not expecting
• Attempting to elicit unintended reactions from the app
• Determining unplanned workflows through the app

Different Strategies for Security Testing

1. Expense in Manual inspections and Reassess

These are manual inspections and reviews intended at testing the security implications of processes, policies, and people, through the security necessities, the investigation of the documentation, and the technological decisions, like the architectural designs and the coding policies. Moreover, interviewing your system owners and designers can rapidly help identify any security concerns and determine whether persons understand security policies and processes.

The trust-but-verify form or model should be accepted for this strategy to be successful. While it can be time-taking and relies on the accessibility of an expert tester and documentation, this exceptional strategy is one of the few means to measure the adequacy of the security processes, policies, and skill-sets you have in place in your company.

2. Shape Your Security Tests with Threat modeling

Thread modeling supports software developers to calculate the threats for an app, gain a realistic attacker’s vision of the system, and map mitigation strategies to face possible vulnerabilities to focus the accessible resources and concentration on the major priorities.

OWASP suggests that it is better to build up teams and draft a threat model for all apps, as soon as possible in the Software Development Life Cycle, as well as revise it as the app evolves. They also outline the approach for developing a threat model on the basis of the NIST 800-30- (National Institute of Standards and Technology standard) for threat assessment: 1) Decompose the app 2) Define and classify the assets 3) Explore potential threats 4) Explore possible vulnerabilities 5) Craft mitigation strategies.

3. Smartly Review the Underlying Code 

This is a white-box testing method that necessitates access to the code. The source code must be made accessible for security test purposes, particularly when you are developing the app in-house. The majority of security specialists will agree that there is no way around checking at the code to perfectly understand what is going on, or supposed to be occurring and to detect several important security issues like backdoors, weak cryptography, flawed business logic, etc. which can be tremendously hard to discover with black-box tests methods such as penetration tests. Source code review requires expert and highly proficient security developers.

The majority of the companies have started to use security linting or Static App Security Testing (SAST) tools that assist in detecting security threats or vulnerabilities in source code by examining configuration and dependencies and confirming that coding standards and guidelines were respected without in fact implementing the underlying code. Such efforts can work as a test in the development procedure; however, aren’t enough as a comprehensive security effort because of lack of coverage and an intention to create false positives.

4. Vulnerability Management Is Crucial

It is the process used to inspect a weakness or vulnerability, find out the harm it could cause in case if exploited, and guess the charge to fix it. Once these factors are identified, weaknesses or vulnerabilities can be fixed as the main concern. Robust vulnerability management is crucial to an app security tests strategy. If nothing is carried to prioritize and mitigate vulnerabilities found through security tests, then why bother searching them? The vulnerabilities aren’t eradicated when they are detected, but when they are fixed. However, here are some smart instructions to help you get started:

• Draft your vulnerability ratings (low, high, medium,) and form SLAs to fix every rating
• Spend in good vulnerability mgmt software for keeping your procedure organized
• Document communication processes (when to contact and who)
• Hold teams of software development accountable for fixing organized vulnerabilities
• Regularly re-examine vulnerabilities to observe if your tests efforts are working to decrease the entry of new vulnerabilities

When your test efforts start to pay off, a matured vulnerability management procedure will guarantee those vulnerabilities get fixed in a well-timely manner.

5. Penetration Tests

The penetration test (or pen testing) is all about testing a running app remotely, as an attacker would, to identify security vulnerabilities and detect what and if, in degree, the app can be tricked by malevolent content. Penetration testing has proven to be highly powerful for network security however, has restrictions when it comes to website app security. The major penetration testing’s drawback is that it happens too late in the SDLC (software development life cycle). Yet, it can be used for testing if some precise vulnerabilities uncovered by earlier access and reviews have been fixed.

There are some effective automated pen testing tools comprise Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) which help search security vulnerabilities in a running web app preceding to production deployment by feeding malevolent information to detect vulnerabilities such as SQL injections, for instance. This automated pen-testing tool can also assist in detecting runtime flaws like authentication and server configuration problems as well as issues that become noticeable while a known user logs in.

Final Verdict

These above-mentioned strategies for security testing can be used as stand-alone efforts or in amalgamation with others, depending on the SDLC (software development life cycle) stage and the required testing effort of your app. Keep in mind the necessary pieces of a strategic application security testing program.