Online Tech magazine Techjury says the global cost of online crime will reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Additionally, 31% of organizations have experienced cyberattacks on operational infrastructure. Hackers and cybercriminals don’t seem to be slowing down. Thus, devising and employing advanced cybersecurity strategies and tools has become more pertinent than ever.
A leading e-commerce platform sought to enhance its web application security following a rise in cyber threats. The company conducted a comprehensive application security audit to identify vulnerabilities and strengthen its defences against potential attacks.
The company’s web application was running on outdated software versions, making it susceptible to known security vulnerabilities. With the help of an application security audit, the company identified the areas that required attention, updated their software components and ensured that the application was running on the latest versions with patched security vulnerabilities. This improved the application’s security posture and reduced the risk of data breaches.
What is a Web Application Security Audit?
A Web Application Security Audit is a comprehensive assessment of a web application’s security posture to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses that attackers could exploit. It involves analyzing the application’s code, configuration, and architecture to uncover potential security flaws such as injection attacks, broken authentication, and sensitive data exposure.
Steps in Web Application Security Audit
Evaluate the Web Application
The initial step involves assessing the web application at a macro level. By evaluating its components, a plan can be devised to tackle potential security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and other issues that may have emerged due to neglect over time.
- System Architecture: Many legacy applications are monolithic and hosted on internal or managed private servers. In such cases, ensuring the security and currency of the operating system and other software components is paramount. Additionally, assessing server usage is necessary to determine if CPU, RAM, or storage capacity adjustments are warranted to accommodate growth.
- Cloud-based: web applications present distinct challenges. It may be unclear where different elements are hosted; for instance, a single web application might utilize Amazon EC2 for hosting, Amazon S3 for storing user uploads, and Google Firebase for real-time messaging. Understanding usage patterns and associated costs for each service may also be opaque.
- Database: Web application databases vary in type, from relational databases like PostgreSQL to NoSQL databases like MongoDB or Redis. Many applications utilize multiple databases. Begin by cataloguing each database and its respective data types. Evaluate if any performance enhancements can be made, such as optimizing large databases that lack proper indexing or relationships. Document these performance suggestions for future attention.
- Third-party Libraries: Web applications often rely on third-party libraries, which may introduce security and performance vulnerabilities. While third-party dependencies are sometimes unavoidable, it’s imperative to ensure they are consistently updated and secure. A crucial aspect to examine is the presence of a dependency manager for third-party libraries, serving as a centralized repository for updates.
- Testing: Software testing is essential for ensuring reliability and stability. Developers can preemptively detect and rectify bugs by implementing automated tests and adhering to test-driven development (TDD) principles. Begin by evaluating the test coverage of the web application and running the test suite to verify functionality. Even if tests fail, they provide valuable insight into areas requiring attention.
Security Assessment
To safeguard web applications against diverse risks, utilizing a clear checklist of potential security concerns is essential. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) offers such guidelines, proving invaluable when auditing for security issues.
OWASP’s top ten risk factors to pinpoint security vulnerabilities within your code base include:
- Injection: Untrusted data inputted into interpreters, like SQL queries, can lead to unauthorized command execution.
- Broken authentication: Improper authentication implementations can compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens.
- Sensitive data exposure: Failure to protect sensitive data, like financial or health records, through encryption can expose it to interception.
- XML external entities: Misconfigured XML processes may reveal internal files, posing a risk to server security.
- Broken access control: Flawed access control systems may permit unauthorized data access or modification.
- Security misconfiguration: Default settings or unpatched flaws could allow intruders to access servers.
- Cross-site scripting: Injecting client-side scripts can bypass access controls, potentially compromising user data.
- Insecure deserialization: Deserializing hostile objects supplied by attackers can lead to code execution vulnerabilities.
- Components with known vulnerabilities: Outdated components expose applications to various security risks.
- Insufficient logging and monitoring: Inadequate logging and monitoring leave applications vulnerable to prolonged breaches.
By scrutinizing these areas, you can effectively identify and address potential security loopholes in your web application.
Ensure Compatibility
The next step is conducting a compatibility assessment to anticipate potential disruptions from updates. Let’s look at two compatibility checks: Language Compatibility and Dependency Compatibility.
- Language Compatibility: Language Compatibility evaluates how upgrading the programming language or framework impacts functionality. Many popular programming languages provide migration guides for major language versions, offering insights into potential disruptions, such as new features or deprecated functionalities. Utilize tools like the PHP Compatibility Checker to identify compatibility issues within extensive codebases despite their inherent margin of error.
- Dependency Compatibility: It ensures that third-party dependencies align with the updated language or framework version. Dependency managers streamline this process by centralizing updates and removal of unused dependencies. In the absence of a dependency manager, consider installing one to streamline compatibility checks. Otherwise, manual inspection of each dependency or testing of the application in a development environment is necessary to confirm compatibility.
Conduct Code Metrics Analysis
Running basic code metrics to gauge performance, complexity, error rates, and other pertinent issues is the next step. These metrics, standardized and measurable, offer insights guiding the upgrading process.
Key metrics examples include:
- Cohesion of Methods (LCOM): Measures class responsibility. Ideally, this metric aligns with SOLID principles, aiming for a value of one.
- Maintainability Index: Assesses project maintainability based on code lines, complexity, and commented lines.
- Halstead’s Difficulty: Evaluates code understandability by analyzing vocabulary, length, and operators.
Tools like PHPMetrics automate this process, providing visualized metrics specific to PHP applications. Similar platforms exist for various programming languages, facilitating the analysis of code health and improvements over time.
Compile Recommendations
The final step involves compiling recommendations based on the audit’s four areas:
- Architecture Review: Document hardware and software architecture, possibly using flowcharts for clarity.
- Security Review: Prioritize identified security issues based on severity for immediate attention.
- Compatibility Review: Highlight language, framework, and dependency compatibility issues, devising a resolution plan.
- Code Metrics Review: Establish performance, maintainability, and error rates as a baseline for improvement.
Consolidate these recommendations into a comprehensive report for distribution among relevant team members, providing clear guidance for upgrading the web application.
Conclusion
Web application security auditing is not merely a checkbox item but a critical necessity in today’s digital landscape. Regular security audits are crucial to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability, protect against cyber threats, comply with regulations, and maintain user trust. Skillmine’s cybersecurity services proactively identifies and addresses security issues, to help organizations prevent potential breaches and safeguard their web applications against malicious activities.
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