Security Testing: Definition, Types, Importance, and More

Quick Summary: Security testing helps discover hidden vulnerabilities that can allow attackers to steal sensitive data or gain unauthorized access to an application or system. It is a critical process to ensure a robust security posture and prevent cyberattacks. Check out its types, importance, and more information in this article to get a comprehensive understanding of it.

Millions of people perform various tasks digitally every day. While it offers convenience and speed, there are many challenges as well. Primarily, cybersecurity is a big challenge for organizations, causing hurdles in ensuring safe and secure digital interactions.

With the average cost of data breaches rising every year and standing at $4.88 billion as per the IBM Cost of Data Breach Report , securing digital landscapes has become a pressing concern for organizations. Security testing is an essential process that enables organizations to analyze their threat landscape and improve their security posture by eliminating potential weaknesses.

With security testing, organizations can deeply analyze their digital assets, like software applications and APIs, to uncover loopholes that could allow attackers to hijack them or steal sensitive data. The primary goal of security testing is to detect vulnerabilities and eliminate potential security risks.

Let’s get more information about it in this article and how it can benefit your organization.

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What is Security Testing?

Security testing, as you may have guessed, is a process that involves testing software applications from a security point of view. In simple words, it evaluates applications to check for flaws and issues that could result in compromised security.

Security testing helps determine if an application is configured properly and risk-free. Attackers exploit vulnerabilities in applications to gain unauthorized access and steal sensitive data. Security testing helps find these vulnerabilities by assessing applications using different techniques.

Why is Security Testing Important for Your Organization?

Just imagine an attacker finds a critical vulnerability in your application, and with a few efforts, the attacker gains access to it. This is an alarming situation for any organization. Well, this could have been avoided had it already been found.

Although this simple scenario is enough to understand the significance of security testing, the following describes more points of advantages.

Assess Security Posture

Security testing is useful to evaluate your current security posture. If there are any weaknesses, you can revise security measures and strengthen the posture to avoid potential cybersecurity risks. Assessing the security posture is like checking the lock of your vault.

Is it working properly? Are there any loopholes that an attacker can take advantage of to access your protected data? This is what you evaluate with a security posture assessment. It gives insights into the effectiveness of your security measures.

Unearth Vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities are ticking bombs that are hidden and can cause huge dangers if left unaddressed. So, it is pivotal to identify these threats to ensure robust security for your applications and systems.

Security testing helps uncover these vulnerabilities without a hitch. For example, you can leverage a DAST tool to dynamically test your application and discover a myriad of risks like XSS, SQL Injection, CSRF, and more.

Assess Risk

While vulnerability assessment helps you discover potential weaknesses in your applications and systems, it doesn’t offer much information about the risk to your organization. Here, security testing can help you understand the potential risks to your organization.

An organization might be at risk of exposed information or hacking attacks that can be discovered by performing stringent security testing. It can help intercept a myriad of risks like data breaches,

Types of Security Testing

There are various methods that can be used to analyze applications for a wide range of vulnerabilities. Every method has a different approach to test applications. The following are the types of security testing.

Whitebox Testing

It is a type of security testing in which the tester has full knowledge of the application being evaluated. The tester can access the source code and design documents that enable him to assess the inner workings of an application. It focuses on assessing the code structure, internal design, and data flow, instead of checking the functionality.

In simple words, this type of testing focuses on assessing an application based on how it is implemented instead of how it works. So, the code, design, structure, integrations, and other internal specifications are the subjects of testing in this method.

SAST or Static Application Security Testing, is a type of Whitebox testing method that evaluates applications from the inside. It can be automated with a SAST testing tool to inspect binaries or source code and identify potential vulnerabilities that can result in weakened security.

Often, SAST tools are part of the development environment, where developers code and deliver applications. It offers real-time monitoring of the source code and flags security issues during development.

Blackbox Testing

It is a type of security testing in which a tester has no knowledge of the application's internal workings. In this method, the tester sends malicious input to the target application and analyzes the response to discover anomalies or flaws that can indicate security issues.

Blackbox testing evaluates applications when they are running. So, it identifies runtime security flaws that attackers can exploit to hack an application in the production environment.

DAST or Dynamic Application Security Testing is a type of blackbox security testing that analyzes applications from “outside in” by sending a malicious payload and observing the output. DAST tools offer automated security testing by performing simulated attacks on the target application.

Graybox Testing

Graybox is another security testing type that combines the approaches of both the Whitebox and Blackbox testing methods. It means that the tester has partial knowledge of the target application or system. So, with some knowledge of the target, the attacker can create test cases that help evaluate it from inside and outside.

In Graybox testing, a tester does have knowledge about the internal components of an application but doesn’t know how those components interact and work together. Hence, the tester has limited internal knowledge. It helps discover usability issues and reliability issues.

IAST or Interactive Application Security Testing, is a type of Graybox testing. It is a combination of DAST (Blackbox testing) and SAST (Whitebox testing). With the use of IAST tools, you can automate these types of tests.

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Key Security Testing Criteria

No matter which security testing methodology you choose, the goal is to gain a comprehensive insight into your threat landscape and achieve a better state of security. You need to consider various criteria for security testing to meet those objectives most efficiently. Let’s check out these criteria.

Confidentiality and Integrity

Confidentiality is maintaining the privacy of sensitive data and preventing it from being accessed by unauthorized entities. Security testing helps evaluate the effectiveness of your existing security controls in maintaining the confidentiality of your sensitive data and flags potential issues.

Data integrity ensures that your sensitive information is accurate and unaltered to protect it from unauthorized changes. Security testing helps you assess the effectiveness of data integrity by enabling you to check the effectiveness of your measures.

Authentication and Authorization

Authentication and authorization are essential measures to ensure that users’ identities and access rights are verified before gaining access to sensitive data or resources. Authentication makes sure that only authorized users can access the application and its data.

Authorization checks if the person authenticated can access the current resource or data it is requesting access to. You can check whether your current authentication and authorization techniques are enough to protect your data and applications or not by performing security testing.

Availability

Availability ensures that information is always available and accessible. It focuses on preventing downtime caused by threat vectors like DoS or DDoS. Security testing helps assess the resilience of your application against these threats.

Non-Repudiation

Non-repudiation helps trace the origin of transactions. By performing security testing regularly, you can evaluate the authenticity of traces to make sure they aren’t modified.

Resilience

Resilience ensures that your application withstands and quickly recovers from a cybersecurity incident. Security testing helps evaluate resilience to mitigate the potential risks of a cybersecurity incident.

Best Practices for Security Testing

Security testing best practices are ways to improve the quality and outcomes of this process. You can utilize these best practices to get the maximum benefits of testing.

Adopt Comprehensive Testing

Choose a comprehensive security testing strategy that involves static analysis, dynamic analysis, and manual pentesting. This will cover most of the security threats and check your application throughout the SDLC. You can follow a shift-left approach to focus on security from the initial step instead of performing it at the last.

Ensure Wider Coverage

Don’t rely on security testing tools that identify only common vulnerabilities. Choose security testing or vulnerability scanning tools that can discover security flaws beyond the OWASP Top 10 list. For example, OAST (Out-of-band Application Security Testing) is essential for discovering more complex vulnerabilities.

Regular Security Testing

You should leverage continuous security testing to assess your applications regularly. Continuous testing will enable you to always stay ahead of security threats by discovering and patching critical vulnerabilities before they pose any challenge to your application’s security. You can ensure a stronger security posture with regular testing and eliminate potential threats as early as possible.

Integrate Testing into SDLC

Make security testing an integral part of your software development process by integrating it into your CI/CD pipeline. With continuous testing after every build, you can ensure that the software application doesn’t have security loopholes. Consequently, your application will be highly secure against potential cybersecurity threats.

Test Third-party Components

Another factor for security testing is the evaluation of third-party components. Usually, software applications depend on many third-party components that could introduce vulnerabilities resulting in cybersecurity threats. Security testing can help evaluate these third-party components to discover vulnerabilities and eliminate threats arising from those components.

Use Multiple Techniques

Finding different types of vulnerabilities can be challenging if you choose a single testing method. Hence, you should employ multiple testing techniques to discover a wide range of vulnerabilities using different methods of testing, such as Whitebox, Blackbox, and Graybox testing.

Prioritize Vulnerabilities

Prioritizing vulnerabilities will help you focus your resources on highly critical or severe vulnerabilities to mitigate cybersecurity risks. Vulnerability prioritization is important to understand the threat landscape and take effective measures to protect your applications and systems.

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ZeroThreat for Comprehensive Security Testing

Cybersecurity has become a pressing issue for organizations regardless of their sizes. Combating this menace requires a comprehensive security strategy. Security testing should be central to this strategy to continuously evaluate your digital assets for vulnerabilities and flaws that can affect its security posture.

You can leverage ZeroThreat for comprehensive web app and API security testing to discover a myriad of vulnerabilities like OWASP Top 10, zero-day/n-day/1-day, out-of-band vulnerabilities, and lots of CVEs. It can accurately detect various security flaws with zero false positives.

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