web application security scanner is program which communicates with a web application through the web front-end in order to identify potential security weaknesses in the web application.
It performs a black-box test. Unlike source code scanners, web application scanners don't have access to the source code and therefore detect vulnerabilities by actually performing attacks.
A web application security scanner can facilitate the automated review of a web application with the expressed purpose of discovering security vulnerabilities, and are required to comply with various regulatory requirements. Web application scanners can look for a wide variety of vulnerabilities, including:
- Input/Output validation: (Cross-site scripting, SQL Injection)
- Specific application problems
- Server configuration mistakes/errors/version
Web Applications Issues :
- Scripting issues
- Sources of input: forms, text boxes, dialog windows, etc.
- Multiple Charset Encodings (UTF-8, ISO-8859-15, UTF-7, etc.)
- Regular expression checks
- Header integrity (e.g. Multiple HTTP Content Length, HTTP Response Splitting)
- Session handling/fixation
- Cookies
- Framework vulnerabities(Java Server Pages, .NET, Ruby On Rails, Django, etc.)
- Success control: front door, back door vulnerability assessment
- Penetration attempts versus failures
