If you run a web application, one of the things that you need to always think of is the security of your application and the information in it. As the technology online becomes more and more sophisticated, the more complex are the threats and attacks to websites and other online applications. You need to make sure that your site is always protected from these threats and attacks as a leak could potentially harm your reputation and your business. Trust is important when it comes to handling customer information.
This is where application security testing tools come in. These tools are used to review the code used for your web applications and test for possible threats. If you are able to determine such threats then you should be able to protect your application from leaks and hacks and keep the privacy of your customers and information.
What is Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)?
One tool used for application testing is what’s called an Interactive Application Security Testing or IAST. Older web and mobile applications used to only need an open source static code analysis tool or a Static Application Security Testing tool (SAST). However, with newer next generation applications, a combination of SAST and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) is needed to improve testing of applications. IAST combines the techniques of both SAST and DAST to be more efficient in testing these applications. As this technique combines DAST and SAST, its results are very actionable and can be attached to any specific line of code and can also be recorded to be played for developers at a later time.
IAST reports assist developers to isolate and then prioritize on working on the vulnerabilities found during the dynamic scans. These helps the developers to be more effective in reducing risk while making sure that they are able to keep up with the production schedules.
Advantages of IAST
As IAST is able to combine the techniques of both SAST and DAST, it comes with very distinct advantages that you would not find in other testing tools. Here are some of them:
- Results are more actionable than other tools as it is able to provide code-level visibility in the data path taken by the application.
- There are lower chances of false positives because IAST is able to provide evidence of the attack through the application
- It is able to provide a detailed stack of programming instructions that happened in an application exploit done by the simulated attack. So it allows developers to be able to accurately and quickly apply changes to the application code to fix the detected vulnerabilities.
- It is able to simulate attacks against applications and in turn is able to validate the detection and protection capabilities.
Why IAST and Security Testing?
A vast number of web and mobile applications handle huge amounts of data of customers using a service. This data includes private information of individuals which if released can be used for identity theft and fraud just to name a few. Big banks and e-commerce sites use modern web applications today and so testing is crucial to ensure integrity of the data they manage. So companies use sites like Checkmarx.com to make sure that they can keep the integrity of their data and that they continue to be trustworthy in the eyes of the public.
