‘Who would look under the doormat for my keys?’ is the kind of assumption that makes your home vulnerable. Similarly, thinking vulnerabilities in your web applications are well-hidden is a dangerous oversight. These hidden gaps are often the easiest points of entry for attackers.
Shockingly, 70% of web applications exhibit serious security weaknesses, such as lacking basic encryption and Web Application Firewall (WAF) protection. This makes them prime targets for exploitation. With the rise of threats like injection attacks, broken access control, and cryptographic failures, understanding and utilizing Application Security Scan Tools is more critical than ever.
Understanding Application Security Scan Tools
Application security scanning is the process of examining websites and web application components to identify potential security vulnerabilities. These scans delve into networks, databases, and application code to pinpoint weaknesses that could be exploited to compromise sensitive data within your web applications. Common vulnerabilities that these scanners help protect against include SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), malicious code, and misconfigurations.
Application security scans can be performed manually or through automation. Automated scanners can be scheduled to regularly crawl your application, analyzing input fields, forms, and other website elements. This automation is crucial for routine checks and maintaining a secure-by-design system. Manual application security testing is typically reserved for more in-depth investigations, allowing for direct interaction and nuanced assessment of the application’s security posture.
Advantages and Challenges of Application Security Scanning
Application security scan tools offer a systematic and automated approach to uncover both known and previously unknown vulnerabilities across all your web applications. While static analysis tools also contribute to vulnerability detection in your cloud environment, they can sometimes generate a high volume of alerts, many of which might be minor or false positives. A key advantage of application security vulnerability scanners is their precision in minimizing false positives. An alert from a web application vulnerability scanner is a strong indicator of a genuine security issue that demands immediate attention.
Furthermore, numerous industry regulations, such as PCI DSS for the payment card industry and HIPAA for healthcare, mandate regular security assessments to identify and remediate vulnerabilities. Application security vulnerability scanners are invaluable for demonstrating compliance by systematically assessing your web applications. The comprehensive reports generated by these scanners serve as tangible evidence of your proactive security measures during audits.
Despite the significant benefits, effectively configuring application security scan tools can be challenging due to several factors:
- The Ever-Evolving Technology Landscape: Organizations are constantly integrating new technologies, programming languages, dynamic content, and both open-source and commercial tools into their cloud infrastructure. This constant evolution makes systems dynamic and complex to scan comprehensively.
- Authentication and Authorization Complexities: Many security risks are concealed within legitimate user identities and permissions. These can be particularly elusive as they mimic genuine user behavior, whether internal or external.
- Keeping Pace with Emerging Threats: Application security scanners can quickly become outdated as threat landscapes evolve. As threats become more sophisticated and harder to detect, development teams must continuously update their security scanning tools to maintain robust protection.
Essential Features of Application Security Scan Tools
High Accuracy and Minimal False Positives
A critical feature of effective application security scan tools is accuracy. False positives – vulnerabilities flagged incorrectly – can lead security teams on time-consuming and resource-draining investigations. Application security testing excels in this area by identifying vulnerabilities within the actual runtime environment of the application, significantly reducing the incidence of false positives.
Automated Scanning and Scheduling Capabilities
For continuous and efficient risk detection and remediation, an application security scan tool must operate autonomously, monitoring your website and its assets without constant manual intervention. The ability to schedule scanning sessions for ongoing monitoring is also essential. Security orchestration platforms like Jit can streamline the scheduling and automation of all your web application scans.
Seamless Integration with Development Tools
Effective application security scan tools should integrate smoothly with:
- CI/CD Pipelines: To automatically trigger scans with new deployments, ensuring security is built into the development lifecycle.
- Development Tools: Including code repositories and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to provide developers with immediate feedback.
- Security Tools: Such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), audit tools, and penetration testing tools, creating a cohesive security ecosystem.
- Project Management Tools: Like Jira, to facilitate collaboration and issue tracking between development and security teams.
These integrations are crucial for embedding continuous security testing into the development process and fostering collaboration between development and security teams.
Comprehensive Reporting and Remediation Guidance
Application security testing tools should deliver detailed and insightful reports to track security improvements over time and highlight persistent vulnerabilities. These reports should provide a clear and understandable overview of your website’s security posture after each scan. Furthermore, the tool should offer actionable, step-by-step guidance to assist in resolving identified issues effectively.
Top 7 Application Security Scan Tools
1. ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy)
Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is a renowned free and open-source application security scanner. It offers a wide array of features including anti-CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) tokens, robust authentication and authorization handling, and an effective alert system. ZAP is backed by the strong community of the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) and benefits from regular updates and feature enhancements. Platforms like Jit simplify ZAP’s setup and deployment, enabling security professionals to quickly leverage its capabilities.
Best for: Security professionals and developers seeking a top-tier open-source scanning solution.
Customer Review: “Easy to install, run, and interpret the results. OWASP ZAP helped me to achieve standards of security testing. The fact that it is an open-source project is just incredible. The documentation is written well and comprehensive.” – Capterra Review
2. Jit
Jit offers a unified security platform that integrates application security scanning with a broad spectrum of security testing methodologies. Jit consolidates web application security testing with SAST (Static Application Security Testing), SCA (Software Composition Analysis), secrets detection, CI/CD security, and cloud security into a single, streamlined platform. These tools are easily integrated into the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) with a single click, delivering results directly to developers within their Pull Requests (PRs), ensuring they can address security issues without disrupting their workflow.
Specifically for application security scanning, Jit simplifies the configuration and deployment of ZAP through an intuitive configuration wizard.
Best for: Organizations seeking a user-friendly way to implement application security testing and integrate a comprehensive developer security toolchain into their SDLC.
Customer Review: “I love the notion of Jit providing as-code security plans, which are minimal and viable. The fact that Jit also automates the selection of relevant security tools and unifies the experience around them is super valuable.” – Jit Customer Review
3. Wapiti
Wapiti takes a different approach to vulnerability detection, focusing on analyzing deployed web pages rather than source code. It actively crawls web pages, looking for error messages and anomalies. Wapiti employs fuzzing techniques, using invalid or random data as inputs to test for script vulnerabilities. Security testers use Wapiti to identify vulnerabilities such as file handling errors, database injection flaws, and cross-site scripting weaknesses.
Best for: Identifying risks by actively probing scripts and using payloads to trigger errors.
Customer Review: “Very well done. We have been looking at tools to help secure web applications. They were either obnoxiously overpriced or did not have the flexibility we sought. This has, so far, been quite easy to use and take the information to secure the applications properly.” – SourceForge Review
4. w3af
w3af (web application attack and audit framework) is designed to target the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities commonly found in websites. It offers both a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and a command-line interface (w3afconsole). Using black-box testing techniques and plugins, w3af conducts application security tests for over 200 types of threats, including XSS, Injection flaws, Local File Inclusion (LFI), Remote File Inclusion (RFI), and CSRF.
Best for: Penetration testing using open-source tools.
Customer Review: “The tool is modular and extensible. It has garnered over 2000 GitHub stars, and its source code is readily available.” – LinuxSecurity Expert Review
5. Rezonate
Rezonate specializes in scanning web applications to discover and profile both human and machine identities accessing them. It delves into the permissions and authentication mechanisms associated with each identity, identifying potential vulnerabilities within your web applications’ Identity and Access Management (IAM) framework. Rezonate helps mitigate risks throughout the identity management lifecycle and provides a risk score for your web application’s security, serving as a benchmark for tracking security improvements over time.
Best for: Gaining deep visibility into identities accessing your web applications and preventing IAM-related threats.
Customer Review: “By embracing the dynamic cloud and applying that same agility towards its security, Rezonate is changing the way cloud security is thought of today.” – Rezonate Customer Review
6. Spectral
Spectral focuses on evaluating your web application’s code, configurations, and other source code elements to uncover risks such as exposed API keys and cloud misconfigurations. It automates the scanning process and is particularly effective at safeguarding secrets during build time. Spectral is language-agnostic and compatible with over 500 different technology stacks, making it adaptable to the evolving landscape of web application frameworks and technologies.
Best for: Securing web applications against data breaches caused by secrets mismanagement.
Customer Review: “Integrates easily into ADO, allowing us to track down exposures we previously had no knowledge about.” – Capterra UK Review
7. Imperva
Imperva is a comprehensive security operations center (SOC) solution, particularly robust in protecting against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. Imperva’s Scuba Database Vulnerability Scanner can scan your web applications for over 1000 vulnerabilities based on industry standards and provides protection against zero-day attacks. It excels in automating policy creation and implementation for enhanced security management.
Best for: Automating security policy creation and enforcement.
Customer Review: “It is very easy to use, and its scan policy builder and website adding process is very easy; just a couple of clicks and it’s done.” – G2 Review
Enhancing Your Application Security Testing Strategy
Application security scanning is a cornerstone of modern application security strategies. While tools like Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Software Composition Analysis (SCA) play a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities early in the development process, they may not catch all runtime vulnerabilities and can produce a higher number of false positives. Application security testing tools provide a critical layer of defense, offering more accurate results focused on real-world risks.
However, configuring and managing application security testing, especially alongside other essential security toolsets, can be complex. Jit simplifies this complexity by offering an out-of-the-box security toolchain that automates the implementation of SAST, SCA, secrets detection, cloud security, and application security scanning in just a few clicks. Explore Jit today to streamline your application security and safeguard your web applications effectively.
