Stage 5: Vulnerability and Weakness Analysis

Stage 5: Vulnerability and Weakness Analysis

Stage 5 conducts detailed analysis to identify specific vulnerabilities and weaknesses that enable the threats identified in Stage 4. This stage combines automated scanning, manual testing, and architectural analysis to create a comprehensive vulnerability inventory. The focus remains on vulnerabilities that actually enable meaningful threats rather than every theoretical weakness.

Perform automated vulnerability scanning across all components identified in Stage 3. This includes static application security testing (SAST) on source code, dynamic application security testing (DAST) on running applications, software composition analysis (SCA) on dependencies, infrastructure vulnerability scanning on servers and services, and configuration analysis on deployment settings. Automated scanning provides broad coverage and identifies known vulnerabilities efficiently.

Conduct manual security testing focused on business logic and complex vulnerabilities that automated tools miss. This includes testing authorization boundaries between users and roles, analyzing state management for race conditions, examining session handling for fixation or hijacking vulnerabilities, reviewing cryptographic implementations for weaknesses, and testing business workflows for logic flaws. Manual testing requires security expertise but finds critical vulnerabilities that automated tools overlook.

Analyze architectural weaknesses that might not appear as specific vulnerabilities but enable attacks. These include excessive trust between components, lack of defense in depth, single points of failure, missing security monitoring, and inadequate incident response capabilities. Architectural weaknesses often enable attackers to chain multiple smaller vulnerabilities into significant compromises.