What is Application security auditing?
Application security auditing involves assessing an application’s security to pinpoint vulnerabilities and potential threats that could lead to security breaches. This process entails a comprehensive review of an application’s code, configuration, and architecture to gauge its security level and identify areas for enhancement.
The goal of an application security audit is to analyze an application’s security stance and unveil vulnerabilities and weaknesses that malicious actors might exploit. The audit’s components may vary based on specific criteria and the audit’s scope. However, several common elements typically encompass:
1. Scope and Objectives: Clearly define the audit’s scope, detailing the specific applications or systems under review, along with the audit’s objectives. Offering an overview of the application’s purpose, architecture, and technology stack aids auditors in understanding its context and potential vulnerabilities. This phase also outlines the auditing process for web applications, APIs, or cloud platforms.
2. Threat Modeling: Utilize threat modeling to uncover potential risks and attack paths unique to the application. This involves scrutinizing the application’s design, functionality, and potential vulnerabilities.
3. Authentication and Authorization: Assess authentication and authorization mechanisms within the application, including password restrictions, session management, role-based access controls, and any external authentication systems.
4. Architecture and Design Review: Evaluate the application’s architecture and design from a security perspective. This includes scrutinizing network architecture, data flows, access controls, authentication systems, and encryption protocols.
5. Code Review: Conduct an in-depth review of the application’s source code to identify coding flaws and security issues. This encompasses examining code logic, input validation, output encoding, error handling, and security-related coding practices.
6. Data Security: Assess the application’s management of sensitive data like personally identifiable information (PII) or financial data. This includes examining data storage practices, encryption methods, data access rules, and data sanitization techniques.
7. Input Validation and Output Encoding: Review the application’s input validation and output encoding methods to prevent common security vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and command injection.
8. Error Handling and Logging: Examine how the application handles errors, logs issues, and displays error messages to users, ensuring no sensitive information leakage.
9. Session Management: Assess how the application manages user sessions, checking for flaws like session fixation, hijacking, or inadequate session timeout settings.
10. Secure Communication: Review the application’s data encryption during transmission, verifying the use of secure communication protocols like HTTPS, SSL/TLS, and proper encryption configurations.
11. Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Scanning: Conduct automated vulnerability scans and manual penetration tests to uncover known vulnerabilities and security weaknesses, simulating real-world attack scenarios.
12. Regulatory Compliance: Ensure compliance with relevant security standards and regulatory requirements such as GDPR or PCI DSS.
13. Reporting: Document audit findings, vulnerabilities, and recommendations in a comprehensive report. Prioritize vulnerabilities based on severity and provide mitigation strategies and actionable steps to enhance application security.
Benefits
- Identifying vulnerabilities: It assists organisations in identifying vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their applications that attackers may exploit. Organisations can take actions to mitigate these vulnerabilities and improve the overall security of their apps by detecting them.
- Reducing the risk of security breaches: It helps decrease the risk of security breaches by detecting and fixing security flaws. This can assist organisations in avoiding financial losses, reputational harm, and legal liability.
- Improving overall security posture: By finding and correcting security vulnerabilities, application security auditing assists organisations in improving their overall security posture. This can assist organisations in staying ahead of evolving threats and ensuring the security of their applications.
- Cost-effective: It is a low-cost technique for organisations to uncover security flaws and vulnerabilities in their applications. Organisations can avoid the high costs associated with security breaches by discovering these vulnerabilities early on.
- Compliance: It can assist organisations in meeting regulatory and industry standards. Organisations can guarantee that their apps satisfy the needed security standards by discovering and fixing security vulnerabilities.
Application Security Audit Approach
We created our own auditing approach by following the OWASP top 10 guidelines. We understand that automatic tools are insufficient, so it is supported by manual protection testing in opposition to the application. The auditing procedure is as follows:
- Audit planning.
- Assessment and identification of risks.
- Determination of levels of control.
- What steps must be taken to overcome those.
