Automated DAST: The Future of Application Security Testing

Dynamic application security testing (DAST) has been around since the early 2000s. This was when security vulnerabilities and incidents of cyberattacks started surfacing heavily. 

You might have heard of famous viruses like ILOVEYOU and CodeRed, costing organizations billions, and cyberattacks like DDoS launched by MafiaBoy that impacted companies like CNN, Amazon, etc., and cost $1.2 billion worth of damages. 

Security incidents like these require organizations and governments to take stronger security measures and policies to prevent them. 

Early DAST tools were quite basic, capable of detecting mostly common vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting, SQL injections, etc. In addition, they needed more human intervention and were error-prone, time-consuming, and resource-intensive.

Soon, security professionals realized the need for automated DAST and the need to reinvent the wheel to counter growing security concerns and deal with increasingly advanced and complex applications.

Modern DAST is automated, requires minimal human intervention, and provides accurate results. 

What is Automated DAST?

Automated DAST involves conducting continuous security testing in real time on a real device to detect run-time exploits and vulnerabilities using advanced tools accurately. 

DAST is performed from outside the application like a hacker would without knowledge of the app’s internal design, also known as “black box” testing. It analyzes the app and its response to the simulated attack to determine how vulnerable it is to a real cyberattack. 

DAST helps uncover app vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting, injection errors, insecure server configs, and authentication errors. This makes it easier for security professionals to address app weaknesses faster and prevent a real hacker from exploiting them. 

DAST can be performed in two ways—manual and automated. 

• Manual DAST involves humans running scans on applications to find security flaws, such as errors in business logic, zero-day vulnerabilities, etc. 
• Automated DAST involves a software program running advanced scans to detect potential security flaws in a web or mobile app. 

To test app code, you’ll need to automatically feed test data into a DAST tool. This tool can find issues such as app-specific issues, server configuration issues, input/output validation issues, and more. 

DAST automation testing tools follow a black box testing approach where the tool/testers don’t have access to the app’s source code. These automated web application security testing tools simulate a cybersecurity attack to find app vulnerabilities requiring minimal human interaction after configuring it with a hostname, authentication credentials, and crawling parameters. 

With a reliable DAST tool, you can run app scans continuously to detect vulnerabilities and fix them faster before they convert into a cyberattack. These tools also integrate seamlessly with an organization’s SDLC and DevSecOps toolkit and scale with its growth. 

Challenges with Traditional DAST 

Traditional DAST tools scan an app in run-time to detect vulnerabilities by simulating a real-world attack using an emulator. These tools have characteristics including:

• Offering accurate results
• Providing vulnerability assessment reports 
• Securing apps and their code

While DAST is conventionally ‘superior’ testing methodology to Static Application Security Testing (SAST) since it tests the applications in run-time, there are some challenges associated with it.

Testing on Simulators vs Real Devices

Traditional DAST is performed on simulators that offer limited test coverage. Without thorough evaluation, the chances of missing out on some vulnerabilities widen. This increases security risks and the chances of vulnerabilities getting exploited by attackers. 

Automated DAST, on the other hand, allows you to test app security on real devices. This not only offers more accurate results but also provides comprehensive assessments by expanding testing coverage. With a thorough security evaluation, you will be able to spot all run-time app vulnerabilities and their impacts on your organization. This accelerates the risk mitigation process and helps bolster your security posture. 

Time-Consuming 

Traditional DAST scanning is often time-consuming. To ensure wholesome testing and security, they require the tester to test each functionality on each page. This may take hours or even days, which is inefficient for modern businesses that need agility in their operations to deploy software faster in the market. 

Automated DAST solves this by conducting efficient DAST on real devices, eliminating manual intervention and saving time. 

Testing in a Production Environment 

Traditional DAST is performed on the developer build. However, running DAST scans in a live production environment presents several challenges and security risks despite offering useful app insights. 

For example, tests performed in a production environment could interact with sensitive data or accidentally corrupt or expose this data. This impacts the app’s availability and integrity, leading to compliance issues.  

In addition, testing in production consumes heavy resources, degrading app performance and causing downtimes. It can also lead to alert fatigue and false positives due to inaccurate results, which affects user experience.   

No Vulnerability Prioritization Tag

Legacy DAST tools don’t offer a prioritization tag for detected security vulnerabilities. It only shows vulnerabilities as “vulnerable” or “not vulnerable”, which makes it difficult for security teams to prioritize and resolve vulnerabilities based on their criticality. 

For example, if a security vulnerability is highly critical in nature, it should be resolved first. However, if you don’t have information on how critical a vulnerability is, you might not be able to resolve critical vulnerabilities first, thereby increasing risks. 

Modern DAST providers offer CVSS scores to help you understand how critical vulnerabilities are and resolve them accordingly. 

Limited Coverage

Legacy DAST tools test an app’s external behavior, like user interface, and not internal working or unreachable/hidden parts. Thus, these tools can’t detect vulnerabilities in an app’s back-end components. They also can’t detect complex vulnerabilities and struggle to deal with session management and user authentication.  

Overhead for Companies 

You need expert security analysts to interpret the outcomes and their impacts on your organization. This is overhead for startups and smaller organizations that don’t have a dedicated team of security analysts or resources to support it. 

In addition, traditional DAST doesn’t provide data flow analysis within the app to detect improper data handling or potential leaks, which is a challenge even for a large organization. 

False Positives

Since traditional DAST tools operate without knowing the app’s business logic, user experience, etc., they involve accuracy issues and may generate more false positives/negatives. 

Lacks API Vulnerability Detection 

Legacy DAST solutions, primarily focused on web and mobile apps, struggle to test APIs comprehensively. However, APIs are one of the most targeted and exposed parts of applications. Thus, vulnerabilities are left unaddressed, which attackers can find and exploit. 

DAST vs. SAST

DAST and SAST are the two different approaches in the application security testing field. Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) is a conventionally “superior” testing methodology that doesn’t target the source code to perform security testing. It runs scans on the running application. Whereas, Static Application Security Testing (SAST) scans the source code of the application to detect vulnerabilities.

Let’s understand the DAST vs SAST comparison in detail.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)	Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
SAST is performed on running applications to detect vulnerabilities.	SAST is performed on static application to detect vulnerabilities.
DAST follows the black box method or hacker approach.	SAST follows the white box method or developer approach.
DAST is capable of discovering environment and runtime issues.	The tester, while performing SAST, is completely aware of the technologies, designs, and frameworks behind the application.
DAST is more expensive to fix vulnerabilities.	SAST is less expensive.
SAST is performed on a static application to detect vulnerabilities.	SAST is not capable of discovering environmental issues.
DAST only scans web applications and services.	SAST scans all kinds of software.

How Automated DAST Solves Challenges with Traditional DAST

In the past few years, there has been a rapid shift from traditional to automated DAST, fueled by needs like:

• Increased DevSecOps adoption to secure software at each stage in the SDLC
• Evolving web applications with complex, advanced technologies like AI and ML, and
• The need for business agility with automation.

Automated DAST solutions offer automated scanning and are built with more advanced features and capabilities for efficiently and accurately identifying vulnerabilities and securing your SDLC. 

Here’s how automated DAST effectively solves the challenges of traditional DAST. 

Automation

Legacy DAST involves manual, time-consuming security testing. It can’t provide proof that a detected vulnerability is actually exploitable. So, your security team will need to test each potential vulnerability manually, chasing false positives and wasting a lot of time and resources in the process. 

Automated DAST solutions automatically create test data to detect and analyze vulnerabilities in web and mobile apps, providing proof-of-concept for detected vulnerabilities that are realistically exploitable. This offers plenty of benefits, such as:

• Efficient security testing,
• Higher result accuracy,
• Time saved in testing,
• Rapid development and
• Quick releases and faster time-to-market.

Business Agility

With heavy competition and the need for innovation, modern businesses need agility, from product development to its deployment into the market. Legacy DAST doesn’t cut it anymore with manual, error-prone, and time-consuming processes. 

Modern DAST tools, on the other hand, provide business agility by helping security professionals resolve security issues proactively with automated security scans. They offer incredible testing speeds, reducing the vulnerability assessment duration from days and months to hours and even minutes. 

In addition, automated tools offer many benefits to businesses, including:

• Seamless interaction with CI/CD pipelines
• User-friendly, facilitating faster feedback
• Smooth collaboration across teams throughout SDLC

DAST Testing Early in SDLC

Automated DAST testing allows you to detect vulnerabilities early in the SDLC and fix them faster instead of waiting for the production phase when the fixes and interactions become more costly.  

Advanced Reports

Modern DAST tools offer better functionalities and features, such as a user-friendly interface, advanced reporting, and more. With just a few clicks, you can generate reports quickly to get a detailed analysis of detected vulnerabilities and their impacts on your organization. 

This will help you prioritize issues based on their severity and fix them according to priority. In addition, you can use the reports to meet compliance with applicable authorities. 

Complex Vulnerability Detection

Automated DAST tools are capable of detecting complex vulnerabilities, even in business logic. Some DAST tools leverage AI in security testing along with real-time data to detect advanced security risks like zero-day attacks. 

Fewer False Positives/Negatives

Automated DAST tools provide fewer false positives/negatives because they’re built on business cognizance and have a better understanding of app logic and context. They also utilize advanced techniques like ML algorithms to find security flaws, which helps improve result accuracy.  

For example, automated DAST tools don’t tag a detected vulnerability with zero business impact. Thus, unlike legacy DAST, you don’t have to run behind its resolution. Instead, you can focus on other, more critical vulnerabilities and resolve them. 

In addition, automated DAST tools provide CVSS scores to tag vulnerabilities as “critical,” “high,” “medium,” and “low” based on their criticality, which legacy DAST tools lack. As a result, prioritizing remediation becomes easier, clearer, and more actionable.  

Address API security

Unlike traditional DAST, modern automated DAST solutions are capable of addressing API-specific security issues alongside web and mobile apps. These DAST solutions are built with a comprehensive understanding of API attack vectors and authorization and authentication processes. This way, these tools help you secure APIs. 

How Automated DAST Tools Benefit Organizations

Running DAST automated tests benefits organizations by identifying issues and fixing them in time to secure applications. 

Automated DAST on real devices:

• Exposes vulnerabilities accurately
• Provides a deeper, clearer understanding of app security posture in real-time
• Eliminates manual intervention to save time and resources 
• Helps you prepare a solid mitigation plan.

Let’s talk about some of the benefits of DAST automation.

Efficient Vulnerability Detection 

Automated DAST conducts DAST on real devices, eliminating manual intervention to increase testing efficiency and save time. It automatically scans an app’s infrastructure, user interface, and functionality to detect vulnerabilities easily. In addition, you can run multiple scans on several web and mobile apps to identify more security vulnerabilities in less time. 

Enhanced Mobile App Security

Automated DAST helps secure your mobile apps and APIs from a range of cybersecurity risks, such as unauthorized access, data leaks, DDoS attacks, Zero-day attacks, code injection, etc., by simulating a real-world attack. All you need is to run DAST scans on your real device (assuming the tool supports it) and start detecting vulnerabilities and fixing them immediately. 

In addition, you can maintain vulnerability assessment reports to prepare for audits and stay compliant with prevailing laws and regulations. 

Adaptability 

Automated DAST tools are more adaptable as they are designed to be language-agnostic. Thus, they work seamlessly with different applications, from simple to complex, that use different abstraction layers and multiple web frameworks. 

It also allows you to scan a wide range of apps for enterprises, making it scalable. Integrating automated DAST is also effortless for organizations implementing DevSecOps in their SDLC.  

Improved Performance and User Experience 

If an attacker manages to inject harmful code into your mobile application and access it, they can hijack its functions along with authorization and authentication tokens. It impacts the app’s functionality, performance, and user experience. 

Automated DAST helps you get one step ahead of hackers and fix issues in your mobile applications before they can exploit them. Thus, you can maintain app integrity, security, and overall functionality and performance to continue delighting users with the best experiences. 

How to Implement Automated DAST in Your Organization

Follow these steps to implement DAST in your organization.  

Planning

Start by planning the complete DAST implementation process for your organization based on your specific requirements and assets. Assemble your security team, discuss your objectives, gather resources, and plan the process. 

Also, identify the assets or endpoints, such as APIs and applications, on which to run the DAST scans. 

You can also take feedback from app users and document their usage patterns, behavior, and interactions with different parts of the app. It will help you create your test cases and enhance app security and performance. 

Choosing the Best DAST Tool

With plenty of options in the market, choose the best automated commercial DAST scanner that offers comprehensive DAST scans and is laced with advanced features and capabilities.

Check its online and offline reviews to ensure the DAST tool you choose can detect complex vulnerabilities in real time, supports plenty of test cases, and has a good reputation in the market. 

Perform Scans

Once you’ve chosen your preferred automated DAST tool, integrate it into your workflow. Let it create automatic test cases covering potential vulnerabilities. Now, enable the DAST tool to scan your app and discover security vulnerabilities like a hacker would. 

Categorize, Prioritize, and Fix Vulnerabilities

Many DAST tools provide vulnerability assessment reports with CVSS scores to help you prioritize vulnerabilities based on their severity or impact on your organization. 

You can also prioritize those vulnerabilities in a specific order and fix them accordingly. This way, you’ll address the most serious vulnerabilities first and safeguard your apps from attackers. If you notice some vulnerabilities occurring several times in your app, perform regression testing to eliminate them and prevent their future occurrence.  

Best Practices to Maximize Your DAST Efforts 

Consider following the best practices below to maximize your DAST efforts:

Apply DAST Early in Your SDLC

Applying DAST early in your software development lifecycle allows you to detect vulnerabilities early and solve them before the software moves to the production stage. Fixing issues is also easier and less costly in the initial stages compared to later stages, where issues get more complex and security risks become more evident. 

In addition, integrate DAST at all stages of your CI/CD pipeline, from development and testing to deployment. As a result, you can find and neutralize issues as soon as they appear in the pipeline, strengthening app security. 

Complement DAST with More Security Tools

Create a comprehensive automated testing mechanism that combines SAST and DAST with other tools, such as penetration testers, network vulnerability scanners, and log analyzers.

This strategy will enable you to find issues missed by DAST, providing all-around protection for your apps, APIs, endpoints, and network components and improve your incident response. 

DevOps Cooperation

Detecting issues using DAST tools is only the first part of an incident response strategy; you’ll need to ensure they’re fixed properly. This requires smooth cooperation between DevOps or DevSecOps teams. 

Consider integrating your DAST solution with bug-tracking and ticketing systems to create tickets with complete data on the vulnerability scanning for faster remediation. 

Leverage a Test Environment

Use a secure, isolated test environment mimicking a real software production environment for DAST scans. It helps minimize potential data breaches and security incidents. 

Some DAST Tools 

DAST analyzes applications at runtime so that there will be no security gaps left. Thus, it is a useful solution for all your software security problems. I listed the best DAST software for your reference. 

• OWASP ZAP: If you are looking for free dynamic application security (DAST) for your applications, OWASP ZAP is the one. 
• Jit: Let your developers secure everything in minutes they code using Jit so that they can independently resolve security vulnerabilities at the right time. 
• Veracode: If you are a large enterprise and want to secure apps with speed and trust, Veracode is the one you’re looking for. 
• Detectify: Discover the vulnerabilities on the attack surface with 99.7% accuracy, which is best for ProdSec and AppSec teams with Detectify. 
• AppCheck: Experience the complete enterprise application security testing solutions, such as SPA scanning, API scanning, infrastructure, CMS, web apps scanning, and more with AppCheck. 

Secure Every Corner of Your App

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) takes a proactive approach to detect security vulnerabilities at every stage of production so that your web applications can withstand dangerous and complex attacks. With the help of the DAST tools, you can secure every inch of your app by adding an end-to-end security plan from your software development to the production stage.