Best Software Security Testing Tools You Should Know About

Software security testing is an integral part of software quality assurance strategy. We use security testing to assure that data within your software system stays secure and prevents unauthorized access. It helps in securing web applications and software against any malicious threats that affect the quality, security, and integrity of the product. You can also check whether the software has an encoded security code or not.
The areas covered by software security testing services are as follows:

• Integrity
• Authorization
• Confidentiality
• Non-repudiation
• Authentication
• Availability

Why Do We Need Security Testing?

Web application and software development companies know that they cannot make their products 100% secure. They want to know what type of issues they are dealing with. There are several reasons to include security testing in order to maintain your quality strategy, ranging from analyzing software security levels to prevent unexpected breakdowns. Some of the important reasons are:

• To maintain the customer’s trust in your product
• Prevent inconsistent performance
• Save extra costs required to solve security issues
• Prevent unidentified users from accessing crucial data
• Analyze vulnerabilities that might lead to security leaks

There are various paid, free, and open-source security testing tools that one can use to check the flaws and vulnerabilities in web applications. Here’s the list of top software security testing tools that can be used to check how secure software or web applications are:

Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP)

Developed by the open web application security project (OWASP), ZAP is an open-source, multi-platform web application security testing tool. It can find security vulnerabilities during the development and testing phase. ZAP security testing tool exposes:

• XSS (cross-site scripting) injection
• Application error disclosure
• Session ID in URL (uniform resource locator) rewrite
• Missing security headers and anti-CSRF (cross-site request forgery) tokens
• SQL injection
• Cookie without HttpOnly flag set
• Private IP disclosure

Acunetix

This is a fully automated web vulnerability scanner that detects and reports over 4500 web application vulnerabilities, such as XSS and SQL injection variants. It helps security testing engineers by automating tasks that take hours with a manual approach, delivering precise results faster with no false positives. Acunetix supports HTML5, content management system (CMS), JavaScript, and single-page applications. It also includes advanced manual tools for security testing engineers and integrates with issue trackers and web application firewalls (WAFs).

Iron Wasp

It is a graphic user interface (GUI) based scanning tool that checks over 25 different kinds of web vulnerabilities. Iron Wasp can also detect false positives and negatives. The tool is built on Ruby and Python, which generate RTF (rich text format) and HTML reports.

Wapiti

It is an open-source, web application security testing tool from SourceForge and devloop. Wapiti performs black-box testing to check web applications for security vulnerabilities. Since it is a command-line application, one should know various commands used by Wapiti. This tool injects payloads to check whether a script is vulnerable or not. It provides support for both POST HTTP and GET attack methods.

Hackerone

Hackerone is a hacker-powered security platform that can find and fix critical vulnerabilities. You do not have to wait for the report to find the issues in the software application. It uses tools like Slack that let testing team members easily communicate with each other. HackerOne also supports integration with products like Jira and GitHub and allows testing teams to collaborate with dev teams. 

Wrapping Up

Security testing is necessary for companies that deal in software development. If you overlook system and information security, it is like pushing your business to go downhill. Just like software testing, having the right selection of testing tools is also important. You can hire professional quality assurance firms, such as QASource, that use cutting-edge security testing tools while you focus on development and other tasks. QASource offers customized and budget-friendly security testing services to help you develop quality and reliable software or web applications. Contact QASource to know more.