Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) Tools

DAST tools test running applications by simulating attacks, finding vulnerabilities that only manifest during execution. These black-box testing tools complement SAST by identifying runtime issues, configuration problems, and deployment vulnerabilities.

OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) leads the open-source DAST space with comprehensive scanning capabilities, extensive API support, and active community development. Burp Suite Professional provides powerful manual and automated testing capabilities favored by security professionals. Acunetix specializes in web application scanning with strong JavaScript analysis. These tools excel at finding injection vulnerabilities, authentication flaws, and configuration issues.

Modern DAST tools increasingly support API testing as microservices architectures proliferate. Postman with Newman enables API security testing in CI/CD pipelines. OWASP API Security Top 10 guides specialized API testing. These tools address the unique security challenges of API-first architectures.

# DAST automation framework example
import time
import json
from zapv2 import ZAPv2
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

class DASTAutomation:
    def __init__(self, target_url, zap_proxy='http://localhost:8080'):
        self.target = target_url
        self.zap = ZAPv2(proxies={'http': zap_proxy, 'https': zap_proxy})
        self.setup_selenium()
        
    def setup_selenium(self):
        """Configure Selenium to use ZAP proxy"""
        proxy = "localhost:8080"
        chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
        chrome_options.add_argument(f'--proxy-server={proxy}')
        chrome_options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')
        self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=chrome_options)
        
    def authenticated_crawl(self, username, password):
        """Crawl application with authentication"""
        # Navigate to login page
        self.driver.get(f"{self.target}/login")
        
        # Perform login
        self.driver.find_element(By.ID, "username").send_keys(username)
        self.driver.find_element(By.ID, "password").send_keys(password)
        self.driver.find_element(By.ID, "login-button").click()
        
        # Wait for login to complete
        time.sleep(2)
        
        # Start spidering from authenticated session
        scan_id = self.zap.spider.scan(
            self.target,
            contextname='Authenticated',
            recurse=True
        )
        
        # Wait for spider to complete
        while int(self.zap.spider.status(scan_id)) < 100:
            print(f"Spider progress: {self.zap.spider.status(scan_id)}%")
            time.sleep(5)
            
    def run_active_scan(self):
        """Execute active security scan"""
        print("Starting active scan...")
        scan_id = self.zap.ascan.scan(self.target)
        
        while int(self.zap.ascan.status(scan_id)) < 100:
            print(f"Scan progress: {self.zap.ascan.status(scan_id)}%")
            time.sleep(10)
            
        return self.zap.core.alerts(baseurl=self.target)
    
    def generate_report(self, alerts):
        """Create detailed security report"""
        report = {
            'scan_date': time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'),
            'target': self.target,
            'total_alerts': len(alerts),
            'risk_distribution': {},
            'vulnerabilities': []
        }
        
        # Categorize by risk
        for alert in alerts:
            risk = alert['risk']
            report['risk_distribution'][risk] = \
                report['risk_distribution'].get(risk, 0) + 1
            
            vuln = {
                'name': alert['name'],
                'risk': alert['risk'],
                'confidence': alert['confidence'],
                'description': alert['description'],
                'url': alert['url'],
                'parameter': alert.get('param', ''),
                'attack': alert.get('attack', ''),
                'evidence': alert.get('evidence', ''),
                'solution': alert['solution'],
                'reference': alert['reference'],
                'cwe_id': alert.get('cweid', ''),
                'wasc_id': alert.get('wascid', '')
            }
            report['vulnerabilities'].append(vuln)
        
        return report
    
    def cleanup(self):
        """Clean up resources"""
        self.driver.quit()
        self.zap.core.new_session()