SAST Tools and Manual Testing to Improve the Methodology of Vulnerability Detection in Web Applications

Abstract

Statically analyzing code during development is a common process of the development process, using Static Application Security Testing tools. SAST analyzes code without its execution and is also very fast compared to dynamic means and therefore focuses on a certain program part. However, the results of static analysis tools are not always accurate, either missing vulnerabilities or reporting false positives. This paper considers an evaluation of several SAST tools and an analysis of student code samples with known vulnerabilities, comparing manual analysis with the results of SAST tools. The results confirmed that SAST tools properly identify critical vulnerabilities and provide errors. A tool has identified ShiftLeft as the most efficient tool; however, its findings overlapped with the results of other tools for some applications. In addition, an analysis of student projects showed the most frequent vulnerabilities as Cross-site Scripting (XSS), NoSQL/SQL Injection, and Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) which make up more than 52% of the found vulnerabilities.