OWASP AppSec Research 2013

By this point, most organizations have acquired at least one code or application scanning technology to incorporate into their software security program. Unfortunately, for many organizations the scanner represents the entirety of that so-called “program” and often the scanners are not used correctly or on a consistent basis. 

This presentation looks at the components of a comprehensive software security program, the role that automation plays in these programs and tools and techniques that can be used to help increase the value an organization receives from its application scanning activities. It starts by examining common traps organizations fall into where they fail to address coverage concerns – either breadth of scanning coverage across the application portfolio or depth of coverage issues where application scans do not provide sufficient insight into the security state of target applications. After discussing approaches to address these coverage issues, the presentation walks through metrics organizations can use to keep tabs on their scanning progress to better understand what is being scanned, how frequently and at what depth. 

The presentation also contains a demonstration of how freely available tools such as the open source ThreadFix application vulnerability management platform and the OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) scanner can be combined to create a baseline scanning program for an organization and how this approach can be generalized to use any scanning technology.