![]() ![]() SAST investigates an app's source code to look for bugs - and while this is a great idea in theory, in practice it tends to report many false positives. The DAST concept is advantageous in many ways - and is often more practical than alternate "white box" methods like SAST (static application security testing). The advantages of a DAST approach Accuracy This is one reason Burp Suite Pro has gained its reputation as the ethical hacker's Swiss Army knife and become industry standard pentesting software. Using the intercepting proxy approach, a tester can change the response that is sent to a server by their browser - opening up a wealth of opportunity for exploring vulnerabilities. ![]() The ability to read all communication sent between a web app and your browser is priceless in the DAST context. Burp Suite will even do this for HTTPS (encrypted) traffic. In the case of Burp Suite, it entails a piece of software that intercepts all HTTP traffic between the tester's browser and their target web application. This is why, in addition to Burp Scanner, Burp Suite Professional also includes a powerful intercepting proxy tailored to the needs of manual web security testers.Īn intercepting proxy is a fairly simple concept. ![]() This approach frees up extra time for them to then work on more interesting vulnerabilities. Often, a tester will use an automated DAST solution first, to harvest "low-hanging fruit". While automated software saves penetration testers and bug bounty hunters a great deal of time, there are certain situations where human creativity and lateral thinking is irreplaceable. No automated vulnerability scanner will pick up every bug. Burp Suite Enterprise Edition is designed specifically with enterprise security use-cases in mind - integrating seamlessly with development software and providing extreme scalability. Where an organization manages many web applications, or where developers are using a DevSecOps approach, automated DAST scanning will often be carried out continuously. These augmented capabilities come thanks to input from IAST (interactive application security testing) and OAST (out-of-band application security testing) techniques. ![]() This could involve anything from using brute force code injection techniques like "fuzzing", to searching for instances where user login details are handled in an unsafe manner.īurp Suite's automated scanner is capable of detecting a long list of security vulnerabilities - many instances of which wouldn't be reported by conventional DAST alone. Next, in the case of Burp Suite, the software would audit the app for vulnerabilities. Building a crawler is actually a lot more complicated than it sounds, given the dynamic and volatile nature of many modern web apps. Armed with this knowledge, it can then create a map. Burp Suite's scanner simulates this by "crawling" the web application you're looking at.Ī crawler is a type of bot that can automatically visit and log each page of a web application. And like a bank robber, the first thing a real cyber attacker will do is case the premises. How does dynamic security testing work? Automated DASTĪs we know, the concept behind DAST is that it mimics a real attack. It only requires that you don't have insider knowledge of the systems you're testing. So DAST is broad enough to include both automated and manual techniques. Large parts of it simply can't be automated. But manual penetration testing is also (generally) DAST - and requires the kind of lateral thinking only a human is capable of. The automated scanner at the heart of Burp Suite, for instance, is rooted in DAST. Is DAST an automated or manual methodology? Nowadays it can augment and improve its scans with other testing methods, but it's still a black box tool at heart. Its aim is to simulate a real attack.īurp Suite was born out of the DAST mindset. This is called a "black box" testing method - because the tester can't see inside the metaphorical "box". DAST necessitates that the security tester has no knowledge of an application's internals. A good analogy would be testing the security of a bank vault by attacking it. Dynamic application security testing (DAST) What is DAST security testing?ĭynamic application security testing (DAST) tests security from the outside of a web app. ![]()
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