What Are The Different Types Of Security Tests?

People who just have a vague idea about security testing talk about it as if it is a singular term. But the opposite is true. There are different types of security tests that are performed using a specialized set of tools and processes.

Security testing is an area that keeps evolving constantly. The security testing methods that were popular before 5 or 10 years must have lost its relevance today. Read ahead to learn more about the major types of security tests.

Static Code Analysis

It is one of the oldest forms of security tests and that is why it is one of the first tests that people think of when they hear of security testing. Before the complexity of the security sector increased on the introduction of cloud computing, static code analysis was the most important security test.  In static code analysis, the source code is reviewed to identify problems that might lead to security breaches in an application or resources that the application has access to. Coding flaws that could lead to injection attacks or buffer overflows are classic examples of vulnerabilities you might be looking for in static code analysis.

Static code analysis can also be done by hand whereby developers read through the code manually, scanning for security flaws if any. However, this method is not practical in large scale, considering the possibility of humans overlooking the flaws and extremely large size of code files. This factor sheds light on the importance of using automated tools to scan through the code and detect the flaws in it.

Penetration Testing

Penetration testing is done by simulating attacks against an application or infrastructure in order to identify what the weak points are. For example, you may use a tool like Nmap to try to establish connections between all endpoints in a network and a non-trusted source. If in the test, you find any endpoints accepting the connection, you will have to make them stop accepting connections from arbitrary hosts.

There are different types of penetration tests including ones that focus on network, authentication gateways, applications, or databases.

Compliance Testing

Compliance tests are sometimes called conformance tests. They are performed to assess whether an architecture, configuration, or process meets an organization’s predefined policies. Application of compliance testing is not merely limited to security, but it can be used to maintain application response times and performance.

Compliance tests used in security ensures that the configuration of the given application or its deployment architecture meets the minimum standards that are expected by your enterprise. The test works by making a comparison between actual configurations and configurations that are regarded as unsafe. If the tests identify incongruousness, it indicates that there are security issues or some other problem.

Compliance tests are not to be confused with tests that are performed to find whether your organization meets the regulations set by the government. Compliance tests simply intend to identify non-conformance with practices regarded to be the best or with predefined policies. They can be used to meet regulatory compliance requirements, but their scope is not limited to that.

Load Testing

The primary objective of load testing is to optimize the performance and availability of the application that is being tested. It measures the performance of an application under high demand. Although boosting the application performance is the area that load testing deals with, the security admins still have to pay attention to it for a reason, which are Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks overwhelm an application with heavy traffic and a high volume of requests, thereby disrupting its availability.

Load tests give organizations an idea about the level of abuse it can tolerate before the DDoS attack makes the whole application unavailable.

Origin Analysis Testing

The popularity of origin analysis testing increased with the rising popularity of open-source software over the last decade. Origin analysis testing enables security admins and developers to trace out the origin of a piece of code.

In some cases, your source code might have originated from a third-party project or repository, primarily because of the ease with which developers can incorporate open-source code into their applications. Security admins have to ensure that the code conforms to the internal security standards of the organization and any vulnerability in it is addressed.

Licensing considerations are also relevant here to ensure conformance with the license of the third-party code that you are using in your application. A large number of tools are currently available to scan the source code and perform origin analysis testing.

The list of security tests discussed in this article does not include all the possible security tests. There are also other types of tests that can be included as a part of your security strategy. The tests discussed above are especially important when facing security threats in an era of cloud computing.