Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) analyzes a web application to detect security weaknesses through simulated attacks. This approach evaluates the application from the “outside-in” by attacking an application like a malicious actor. After carrying out these attacks, the tool analyzes the results and identifies any unexpected behavior, helping to detect security vulnerabilities.

This blog dives deep into the world of Dynamic Application Security Testing, shedding light on how it operates, why it matters, and how it stacks up against SAST in a thorough comparison.

What is DAST?

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) is a vital tool for spotting weaknesses in an organization’s APIs. The term “dynamic” reflects its real-time approach to security testing, assessing applications while they’re running.

Security teams rely on DAST to monitor an application’s behavior and see how it responds to simulated attacks. These staged attacks are designed and executed without prior notice to the security team, mimicking the tactics an attacker might use to exploit potential vulnerabilities.

Why is DAST Important?

It provides a real-time, outside-in view of risks and security weaknesses, enabling security teams to find issues that other testing methods might overlook.

Its broad coverage across the complete attack surface covers deep insights into API security and dynamic content security, which also includes security weaknesses and misconfiguration dependencies.

It offers scalability and flexibility for security audits and modern agile development processes and also provides integration and automation features to help create DevSecOps workflows.

How does DAST work?

DAST simulates automated attacks on an application to identify unexpected behaviors and vulnerabilities. DAST tool's development and configuration require security experts with in-depth knowledge of database access control lists, web and application servers, and application security testing.

DAST approaches applications from the outside using attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, brute-force attacks, and SQL injection attacks. As DAST tools approach the application externally, they have no access to its source code and thus often rely on other tools to manage application vulnerability effectively.

Strengths and Limitations of DAST

DAST helps security teams identify vulnerabilities in live applications, but it comes with both advantages and challenges. Let’s take a closer look at its key strengths and limitations.

Strengths

• Real-Time Vulnerability Detection: DAST regularly checks running web applications and identifies vulnerabilities in real-time. This allows security teams to detect threats before attackers can exploit them.

• Risk Reduction: DAST reduces the risk of possible threats and breaches by detecting vulnerabilities early in development, enhancing the APIs' security posture.

• Integration with CI/CD Pipelines: DAST seamlessly integrates with CI/CD pipelines and automates checks at every development stage of the APIs.

• Low False Positives: DAST has a low false positive rate in comparison to other testing technologies like SAST, resulting in more accurate results due to its testing in an operational state, reducing the possibility of false alerts.

• Comprehensive Coverage: DAST detects various vulnerabilities related to authentication, runtime issues, and server configurations that other tests may overlook. It offers insights into application behavior, which helps effectively detect complex security issues.

Limitations

• Time-Consuming Scans: DAST scans can be time-consuming, mainly for complex and large applications. If not managed properly, they can potentially delay development timelines.

• Limited Visibility: DAST focuses on external security weaknesses and may not find internal business logic flaws or architectural issues, which means it may overlook security weaknesses related to how the application handles user interactions or application processes.

• Difficulty with Non-Standard Authentication: Some DAST tools face difficulty with non-standard authentication mechanisms, limiting their ability to test some critical parts of an application.

How to Select a DAST Tool?

Selecting the right DAST tool is essential for efficiently identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities. Let's have a look at some of the key factors.

CI/CD Automated Scans

The future of application security is integrated and automated with the DevOps and CI/CD pipelines. This ensures early identification of security weaknesses, enabling security teams to address issues before they cause potential harm.

Testing APIs and underlying services help detect the root cause of security flaws easily. Automated scans on every pull request help detect changes, enabling fast and efficient fixes. This strengthens application security and allows smooth and proactive development workflows.

Scheduled Scans

Scheduled scans run in an organizational environment, where they often limit the testing scope to avoid disrupting live systems, increasing the risk of overlooking critical security weaknesses. When security teams identify issues, they may face inefficient and slow processes to find the root cause, leading to delays in remediation.

Additionally, organizations often have safeguards like bot detection and rate limiting, which can interfere with the scanner’s ability to conduct thorough and proper tests. Despite their simplicity, these scans may leave significant security gaps unaddressed.

Manual Scans

Manual scans are easy to start but often struggle to scale across teams. The findings from these scans can also be complex to reproduce for those deploying fixes. However, when manual scans share configurations with automated testing, they become much more effective for validating fixes.

Authenticated Scans

If the application requires a user log in, choosing a scanner that supports authenticated testing is essential. Scheduled and automated scans can make this more complex, so ensure the tool supports your specific authentication method, such as external tokens, cookie-based authentication, or bearer tokens.

DAST vs. SAST

DAST and SAST are both important application security testing methods, but their approaches differ. Let’s have a look over the detailed comparison:

Final Thoughts

DAST plays an essential role in strengthening application security by detecting vulnerabilities in the API environment through real-world attack simulations. Its ability to identify misconfigurations and runtime issues is crucial to any security strategy.

DAST offers various advantages, such as real-time vulnerability detection, low false positives, and comprehensive coverage. Organizations can select a DAST tool on the basis of CI/CD automated scans, scheduled scans, manual scans, and authenticated scans.

Akto provides Dynamic Application Security Testing for APIs, helping organizations identify real-time vulnerabilities as their applications run. It uncovers runtime issues, security gaps, and misconfigurations with accuracy and low false positives. Schedule a demo to learn more about Akto’s approach to DAST.