News of website hacking or leakage by hackers has become common. They have become too sophisticated thanks to the latest hacking tools and techniques.
Therefore, to secure your site or online data, you need to stay one step ahead of them. It is where web applications are. A testing tool can help you determine how secure your web applications are.
Its main function is to perform functional testing of the application and look for vulnerabilities that can lead to data leakage or hacking, without access to the source code.
There are many paid and free tools available on the market to test your web applications.
And in this digital world, the need for security testing is growing every day.
With the rapid increase in online transactions and user activities, security testing has become mandatory.
Also, several security testing tools are available on the market, and few new ones appear every day.
What Is Security Testing?
Security testing is performed to ensure that data in the information system is protected and inaccessible to unauthorized users. It protects applications from serious malware and other unforeseen threats that could lead to their collapse.
Security testing identifies all loopholes and weaknesses in the system at an early stage. It is done to verify that the application has an encrypted security code that is not available to unauthorized users.
Security testing mainly covers the critical areas listed below:
- Authentication
- Authorization
- Availability
- Privacy
- Integrity
- Negation
Below are the main objectives of security testing:
- The main purpose of security testing is to detect the leak and eliminate it at an early stage.
- Security testing helps to assess an existing system’s stability and helps to stay in the market for a long time.
Testing safety helps to avoid:
- Loss of customer confidence.
- Loss of important information.
- The theft of information by an unauthorized user.
- Incorrect site operation.
- Unexpected malfunction.
- Additional costs to repair websites after an attack.
Now let’s explore the top open-source security testing tools in the world.
Snyk Container
Snyk container is a container security product and a specialized vulnerability scanner in the sense that it is correctly oriented to the development process and is an indispensable solution for developers.
Snyk connects directly to code repositories, parses the project manifest, and analyzes the imported code with direct and indirect dependencies. It supports many popular programming languages and can detect hidden licensing risks.
Features:
- Find known vulnerabilities by running snyk test on a project either as a one-off or as part of your CI process.
- Fix vulnerabilities using snyk wizard and snyk protect.
- snyk wizard guides you through finding and fixing known vulnerabilities within your project. Remediation options include file to update, configuring your policy autopatch and ignore vulnerabilities. (npm only)
- It protects your code from vulnerabilities by applying patches and optionally suppressing specific vulnerabilities.
- The snyk alert keeps track of dependencies and any vulnerabilities on snyk.io so you can be alerted of new vulnerabilities or updates/patches that affect your repositories.
- You can prevent adding new vulnerable dependencies to your project by running a snyk test as part of the CI to prevent checks from failing when adding Node.js or Ruby vulnerable dependencies.
Wapiti
Wapiti is one of the most effective web application security testing tools to assess your web applications. It performs black-box testing to check web applications for possible vulnerabilities.
During the testing process, it scans web pages and enters test data to check for the security breach.
Supporting GET and POST HTTP attacks, Wapiti identifies different types of vulnerabilities.
Features:
- File disclosure
- XSS injection
- Command Execution detection
- Database Injection
- XXE injection
- Potentially dangerous files
- Backup files giving disclose
- CRLF Injection
- Weak .htaccess configurations that are simple to bypass
Wapiti is a command-line application that is difficult for beginners, but easy for experts. The software requires full knowledge of the commands.
Zed Attack Proxy
More commonly known as ZAP, Zed Attack Proxy is an open-source proxy developed by OWASP.
Also, supported by Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, ZAP allows finding various security vulnerabilities in web applications even during the testing and development phase. It is easy to use even if you are new to penetration testing.
Features:
- Automatic Scanner
- Authentication support
- AJAX spiders
- Dynamic SSL certificates
- Forced Browsing
- Intercepting Proxy
- Web Socket Support
- Plug-n-hack support
- REST-based API
- Much more.
Vega
Vega is a free tool for testing open-source web applications. Written in JAVA, Vega comes with a graphical interface. It is available for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. It will help you:
- Find SQL injection
- Validate SQL injection
- File inclusions
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
- Improve the security of TLS servers
The tool also allows you to set settings such as maximum and minimum requests per second, number of nodes, and number of path descendants, etc.
Once you get the appropriate credentials, you can use Vega as an automatic scanner to intercept the proxy and run it as a proxy scanner.
W3af
W3af is a popular framework for testing web application security. Developed using Python, it offers an effective platform for web application penetration testing.
It can be used to detect more than 200 types of security problems in web applications, including SQL injections and cross-site scripting.
It checks for the following vulnerabilities in web applications:
- Blind SQL injection vulnerability
- Buffer overflow vulnerability
- Multiple CORS miss configurations
- Insecure DAV configurations
- CSRF vulnerability and much more
Available in both GUI and console interfaces, W3af is easy to understand. It also allows you to authenticate a website through authentication modules.
Skipfish
Skipfish is an application security testing tool that recursively scans the website, checks each page for possible vulnerabilities, and finally prepares an audit report.
Written in C, Skipfish is optimized to work with HTTP and leaves minimal traces of the processor.
This software claims to handle upto 2000 requests per second, without displaying processor traces. Also, the tool claims to provide high-quality positive results because it takes a heuristic approach when scanning and testing web applications.
The Skipfish web application security testing tool is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Ratproxy
Ratproxy is another open-source web application security testing tool that can be used to find any slippage in web applications, thus making the application safe from any possible hacker attacks.
This semi-automatic testing software is supported by FreeBSD, Linux, Windows (Cygwin), and macOS X systems.
It is optimized to overcome security audit issues that users of other proxy systems continuously face. This test tool easily distinguishes CSS style sheets from JavaScript codes.
SQLMap
SQLMap is a popular open-source web application security testing tool that automates the process of detection and exploitation of SQL injection vulnerability in a website database.
It comes with a powerful testing engine that easily allows the test to penetrate and check for SQL injection in a web application.
It supports many database services, including MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and others. Also, the test tool supports six types of SQL injection methods.
Wfuzz
Wfuzz is another open-source tool for testing web application security that is freely available on the market. Designed by Python, this testing tool is used to coerce web applications severely. Some of the features of Wfuzz include:
- Multiple Injection points
- Output to HTML
- Cookies fuzzing
- Multithreading
- Proxy support
- SOCK support
- Authentication support
- All parameters brute-forcing (POST and GET)
- Baseline request (to filter results against)
- Brute force HTTP methods
- Multiple proxy support
- HEAD scan
- Post, headers, and authentication data brute forcing
When using Wfuzz, you will have to work with the command line interface because the GUI is not available.
Grendel-Scan
It is a useful open source web application security tool designed to find security breaches in web applications. The tool is available for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh and is Java-based.
Grendel-Scan comes with an automated testing module that is used to detect vulnerabilities in web applications. Also, the program has many features, particularly for manual penetration testing.
Arachni
It is an open-source web application security testing tool designed to assist testers and administrators evaluate web application security. Arachni is designed to detect web application security breaches and make it hacker-proof. Arachni can detect the following:
- SQL Injection
- XSS
- Local File Inclusion
- Remote file inclusion
- Invalidated redirect, and many others
Arachni supports all major operating systems such as MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Grabber
Grabber is an open-source web application scanner that detects vulnerabilities in web application security. It is portable and designed to scan smaller web applications such as forums and personal websites. It includes the following features:
- File Inclusion
- Backup files verification
- Simple AJAX verification
- Generation of a file for stats analysis
- Hybrid analysis testing for PHP application that uses PHP-SAT
- Cross-Site Scripting
- SQL Injection
It is a small testing tool and takes more time to scan large applications. Moreover, since it was designed for personal use, the scanner has no GUI interface and no function to generate reports in PDF format.
Grabber was developed in Python. Therefore, you can easily find the source code and modify it to meet your requirements.
Acunetix
You can complete penetration testing automation tools for your application that can scan your sites for 4500+ vulnerabilities.
The most striking feature of Acunetix is that it can crawl thousands of pages without error.
Other Features:
- Most advanced SQLi and cross-site scripting testing
- It scans both open-source as well as custom-built applications
- Deep scan technology for effective scanning
- It can easily generate any kind of technical and compliance report
- Effective login sequence recorder
- Acusensor technology that enhances regular dynamic scan
- Built-in vulnerability management module
Netsparker
Netsparker is one of the most accurate scanners on the market. Thanks to its ability to detect deadly vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc.
Features:
- Ability to scan any web-related app
- Coverage for more than 1000 vulnerabilities
- You can check for coding related errors
- It can generate regulatory compliance and web application
Metasploit
It is one of the most widely used penetration testing systems. Metasploit is an open-source testing platform that allows security testers to do much more than assess a vulnerability.
Features:
- The framework is much more advanced than that of its competitors
- It has more than 1500 exploits
- Meta modules for discrete tasks such as network segmentation testing
- Can be used for the automation of many processes
- Many infiltration scenarios mockup features
Iron Wasp
Open-source Iron Wasp, a powerful scanning tool, can detect more than 25 types of web application vulnerabilities.
Also, it can detect false positives and false negatives. Iron Wasp helps to identify a wide range of vulnerabilities, such as:
- Broken authentication
- Cross-site scripting
- CSRF
- Hidden parameters
- Privilege escalation
Features:
- Extensible via plugins or modules are written in C#, Python, Ruby, or VB.NET
- GUI-based
- Report generation in HTML and RTF formats
To Sum Up
I hope you get a clear understanding of what security testing involves along with the best open-source security tools.
If you start a security test, you should make sure that you do not miss out on these top open-source security tools to make your applications reliable and secure.