Mar. 07, 2024
Machinery
0 mins read
When building a new kind of service or application, it’s critical to keep security in mind. After all, security breaches can lead to incalculable costs for your business in the blink of an eye. There are many different ways to check the safety of your applications. And while no method can guarantee security 100%, you should always make the effort to keep your apps secure and strive to improve your application security. Snyk's application security solution can help you stay ahead of vulnerabilities by empowering developers to build securely.
Interactive application security testing (IAST) is an application security testing method that tests your application for vulnerabilities in execution, while the app is actually being used (either by a real user or an automated test runner). Some IAST tools even come with IDE integrations, which allow you to run the security analysis while developing the application.
The core of an IAST tool is sensor modules, software libraries included in the application code. These sensor modules keep track of application behavior while the interactive tests are running. If a vulnerability is detected, an alert will be sent.
Examples of such vulnerabilities could be hardcoding API keys in cleartext, not sanitizing your users inputs, or using connections without SSL encryption.
In order to help you determine whether a particular security testing method is a good fit for your application testing environment, it’s important to consider what it has to offer as well as its limitations. Let’s examine the differences between each of these testing methods.
Static application security testing (SAST) focuses on code. It works early in the CI pipeline and scans source code, bytecode, or binary code in order to identify problematic coding patterns that go against best practices. SAST is programming-language dependent.
Dynamic application security testing (DAST) is a black-box testing method that scans applications in runtime. It is applied later in the CI pipeline. DAST is a good method for preventing regressions and doesn’t depend on a specific programming language.
IAST is similar to DAST in that it focuses on application behavior in runtime. But IAST analysis is rather based on a combination of black-box testing, scanning, and analysis of internal application flows. The benefit of IAST is its ability to link DAST-like findings to source code like SAST. The downside of this approach is that it makes IAST programming-language dependent and can only be performed later in the CI pipeline.
Software composition analysis (SCA) focuses on third-party code dependencies that are used in the application. SCA is very effective in applications that use many open-source libraries. This method is also programming language-dependent.
IAST is essentially a combination of SAST and DAST. The IAST method analyzes only the code executed in your tests, like DAST, but it also pinpoints the exact place in the code where the vulnerability was found, as with SAST.
IAST differs from DAST and SAST, but why use it? Let’s look at the key benefits of IAST:
Scans code in production: The greatest benefit of IAST is its ability to scan code that is actually used in production. SAST tools tend to overburden developers with false positives. Sometimes a line of code can indicate a security problem that was addressed in another part of the code base. IAST focuses on the issues that really matter.
Scans code in development: While scanning production code is a huge win, IAST can also be used during development. Some IAST tools come with IDE integration to give engineers quick feedback on the features they’re in the process of implementing. This shifts the security checks to the left in the development life cycle, when they are cheaper to fix.
Quick remediation: IAST links issues with code locations, which is where IAST differs from DAST. IAST allows you to click through your application to find problems and provides recommendations for quick remediation. This isn’t without any risk. Just because you’ve never tested the code, doesn’t mean it won’t have any security vulnerabilities in the production environment. On the other hand, developers’ time is limited and they must invest it wisely.
IAST also has its drawbacks:
Programming-language dependent: The fact that IAST is programming-language dependent is a major drawback. While some tools don’t require you change your code to include their sensor modules, they are still bound to specific technologies. If you happen to use a less popular technology because that perfectly suits your use case, IAST might not be the right choice for you.
Time intensive: The IAST testing method requires you to build and execute your application (which isn’t the case with a SAST) and therefore requires significant time investment in the long run. This might not be a problem for issues that are caught in in development when using IDE plugins, because of the quick feedback. But when you want to build big test suites that have to run on all production releases, things can slow down.
Doesn’t have 100% code coverage: The drawback of scanning only code that is actually executed is that IAST doesn’t scan all the code. While it removes many false positives, it also ignores the code your quality assurance forgot to run in your test. Just because you didn’t think about it, doesn’t mean the code won’t be executed in production.
As with every application security testing method, it is important to analyze your technology stack and processes before choosing one. Depending on your programming language of choice, IAST might not even be an option for you. In such cases, you’d have to fall back on DAST, which only checks the inputs and outputs of your application and doesn’t scan the code.
While IAST may provide critical insights into your application’s security that cannot be derived using SAST approaches, IAST can also significantly slow down your CI pipeline. SAST-based solutions might therefore be a better option for your application on a day-to-day basis.
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Section 5
For enterprise organizations, IAST is a powerful way to establish continuous security testing across the entire application and API portfolio. With IAST, organizations can perform continuous application security testing in parallel across their entire application portfolio.
Many organizations only test a small subset of their application portfolio for security. Some organizations only test the “critical” applications. Others have policies to test all “external facing” applications. More than likely, it won’t be your primary website that gets compromised. Instead, it’s more likely to be a partner website, an obscure mobile API, or a business app on your intranet. This is why protecting all your applications and APIs, even non-web APIs, is so critical.
Many organizations reserve security testing for what they think of as “external” or “public-facing” applications. Actually, the concept of “internal” and “external” applications is dependent on a working security perimeter. Unfortunately, the perimeter established by firewalls and other network security devices has become so porous that it is now essentially meaningless. For example, a single employee workstation that is compromised by an attacker becomes an internal attack portal that makes the perimeter irrelevant. Consider testing your entire application portfolio, including internal applications.
Remember, IAST is nothing like a scanner. IAST effectively becomes part of your application. It can run anywhere that your application runs, including your developer IDE, on a local testing server, on a QA machine, as part of a CI/CD build, in a container, in the cloud, or anywhere else your code runs. You can use IAST anywhere that your software runs throughout the entire software development lifecycle. There are good reasons to use IAST extremely early in development, in integration and test environments, and also in production.
The image below depicts a simple development pipeline, using IAST throughout to identify vulnerabilities continuously.
You can choose exactly which locations in your software lifecycle to use IAST. Because IAST doesn’t require any extra steps, IAST is compatible with all different approaches to software development. IAST is particularly well suited to DevOps, which is allergic to tools that require expert babysitting and take a long time to run.
The process of installation is very simple. There are typically two parts to an IAST solution: an IAST agent and an IAST console. You create an account on the IAST console and then download the IAST agent, which performs the analysis and sends results back to the console.
The first step is to add the IAST agent to your application environment in some way. It might be as simple as adding a library, running an installer, setting an environment variable, etc… Then when you use your application, the IAST agent will automatically do the security testing in the background. Important: you don’t need to attack the application to get great security results. IAST can be used by anyone, even novice developers.
The IAST console enables you to manage security across an entire portfolio of applications in parallel. You can administer security policy, configure security controls, and set up integrations with common development tools for vulnerability notification.
In development, our goal is to empower developers to find and fix their own vulnerabilities and commit clean code. But we must avoid slowing them down or giving them false positive results that waste their time.
IAST is a good match for these goals, because it provides instant feedback on exactly the code that the developer is building and testing in their local environment. IAST alerts might come through the IDE, a chat program, bugtracker, or other integration. Because IAST provides the exact line of code, the full HTTP request, and the full data and control flow, the developer’s work is made easy. They can fix the code and retest with the HTTP request to verify that the problem is resolved correctly, and check in clean code.
In the QA environment, we are looking to ensure that the developers have done the right thing and eliminated any vulnerabilities. We want confidence that the application or API is free from vulnerabilities before we push into production. We want the ability to “fail the build” in the case of serious security vulnerabilities. But we must not slow down the build or require the involvement of security experts.
IAST is a great match for security testing in QA environments, because it runs alongside your normal automated and manual tests and provides security testing automatically in the background. In these environments, the IAST notifications are typically provided through CI/CD tools and bugtrackers. Formal reports can also be generated for audit and compliance purposes.
Doing security testing in production is generally not a great idea. Ideally, you would have found and fixed any security issues long before they reach production. However, there are many “legacy” applications that are no longer being actively developed. There are also third-party products that only exist in production. Yet we still need ongoing, continuous assurance that these applications are free from vulnerabilities. And we want to know if any new vulnerabilities emerge that might affect these applications.
While it is not as common as using in development or testing, IAST can also be used effectively in production. Because IAST does not require the source code, it can be used on almost any application provided it is possible to install the IAST agent. It’s important to consider the performance impact of IAST on these applications. While IAST is generally fast enough not to be noticed in development and test environments, in production even a few extra milliseconds might not be acceptable. Note that IAST often has configurations, such as “sampling mode” that can significantly improve performance in production environments, while still providing great security coverage over time.
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