What is Security Testing and How to Perform It?

Serena Gray
3 min readFeb 3, 2020

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Security Testing is a kind of Software Testing that ensures security for your application systems and applications. It takes care of the fact your systems are free from any vulnerabilities or threats that may lead to a considerable loss. Within the following guide, let us learn more about security testing.

What’s Security Testing?

Security testing of any system is all about looking for all the probable loopholes and weaknesses of this system which may produce a breach in the security.

For Example, it can be a loss of information, earnings, or the standing of the business. The principal focus of this testing is to keep your applications away from any threats or vulnerabilities so that your system does not become exploited. It can help you to find these problems and solving them.

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Moving towards the types of security testing.

There are the following kinds of security testing in software testing. These are as follows:

Vulnerability scanning: Automated software scans a method contrary to recognized vulnerability.

Security scanning: This scan may be performed for both Manual and Automated scanning. It defines the network and system weaknesses. After that, it provides the solution also

Penetration testing: An analysis of a system to test for the possible vulnerabilities if there is an external hacking effort.

Risk evaluation: The analysis of security risks observed from the business is completed here. Risks are classified as Low, Moderate, and High. It helps to supply steps to reduce the risks.

Security auditing: It’s a type of internal review of software and Operating systems for checking the security defects.

Posture assessment: This unites Security scans, ethical hacking, and risk assessments to represent the overall security of their organization.
After understanding the types of security testing, let’s know-how security testing is performed.

How to Perform Security Testing?

There are different stages of an SDLC; each phase has specific security procedures as listed below:

SDLC Phases Security Processes

Prerequisites

Security analysis for demands and assessing any misuse cases

Design

Security risks analysis for designing.

White Box Testing

Integration Testing

Black Box Testing

System Testing

Implementation

Penetration Testing, Vulnerability Scanning

Support

Impact evaluation of Patches

Moving on to another segment, there are particular techniques utilized in security testing. Let us check out what they’re.

There are various techniques followed in security testing. Here is a list enumerating these:

Black box: It helps to run vulnerabilities assessment and attacks.

Grey box: The tester is given with partial details.

Tiger box: The tester has the ability to execute a test on what about the system topology as well as the technology.

Moving ahead, the next topic, queued, is the focus areas of security testing. Let’s discuss it!

There are four focus areas involved in security testing. Following is the listing describing them:

Network Security: It seems for the vulnerabilities in network infrastructure.

Application Software Security: It involves weaknesses various applications, for example, OS, database, on which the program is different.

Client-side Application Security: It makes sure that the client isn’t manipulated.

Server-side Application Security: It ensures that the server-side is sufficiently strong to block any vulnerabilities.

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Serena Gray
Serena Gray

Written by Serena Gray

I work as a Senior Testing Specialist at TestingXperts. I am a testing professional accustomed to working in a complex, project-based environment.

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