What is Security Testing and how to perform it?

Security Testing is a type of Software Testing that ensures security to your software systems and applications. It takes care of the fact that your systems are free from any vulnerabilities or threats that may cause a big loss. In this article, let’s learn more about security testing.

The topics discussed in this article are as follows:

• What is Security Testing?
• Types of Security Testing
• How to perform security testing?
• Techniques for security testing
• Focus areas of security testing

Let’s begin!

What is Security Testing?

Security testing of any system is about searching for all the possible loopholes and weaknesses of the system which might result in a breach in the security.

For Example, it can be a loss of information, revenue, or the reputation of the organization. The main focus of this testing is to keep your software away from any threats or vulnerabilities so that your system does not get exploited. It will help you to detect such problems and solving them.

Moving on towards the types of security testing.

Types of Security Testing

There are 7 types of security testing in software testing. These are as follows:

• Vulnerability scanning: An automated software scans a system against identified vulnerability.
• Security scanning: This scanning can be performed for both Manual and Automated scanning. It identifies the network and system weaknesses. After that, it provides the solution as well
• Penetration testing: An analysis of a system to check for the potential vulnerabilities, if there is an external hacking attempt.
• Risk assessment: The analysis of security risks observed in the organization is done here. Risks are classified as Low, Medium and High. It helps to provide measures in order to reduce the risks.
• Security auditing: It’s a kind of internal inspection of applications and Operating systems for checking the security flaws.
• Posture assessment: This combines security scanning, ethical hacking and risk assessments to represent overall security of the organization.
• Ethical hacking: The hackers attempt hacking in order to expose the flaws in the security system of the organization.

After understanding the types of security testing, let us understand how security testing is performed.

How to Perform Security Testing?

There are different phases of an SDLC, each phase has specific security processes as listed below.

Moving on to our next segment, there are certain techniques used in security testing. Let’s check out what they are.

Techniques for security testing

There are different techniques followed in security testing. Here is a list enumerating them:

• Black box: It helps to conduct vulnerabilities assessment and attacks.
• Grey box: The tester is provided with partial information. It is an amalgamation of white box and black box models.
• Tiger box: The tester has the authority to perform a test on everything about the network topology and the technology.

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

Focus areas of security testing

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

1. Network Security: It looks for the vulnerabilities in network infrastructure.
2. System Software Security: It involves weaknesses various software, for instance, OS, database, on which the software depends.
3. Client-side Application Security: It ensures that the client isn’t manipulated.
4. Server-side Application Security: It ensures that the server-side is strong enough to block any vulnerabilities.

That’s it, folks! With this, we have reached the end of this article. I hope the content explained above helped you in some way. Keep exploring, keep reading!

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