Penetration testing

Penetration testing in Application Vulnerability Response enables application owners to assess the security posture of their application. It is the manual testing of an application by the ethical hacking team.

Roles required

Penetration testing requires the following roles:

App-Sec Manager: Contains security managers and application owners who manage the penetration testing assessment requests. It contains the following granular roles:

• sn_vul.app_manage_pen_test_request
• sn_vul.app_read_all
• cmdb_read

Ethical Hacker: Contains members of the ethical hacking team who perform penetration testing of applications. It includes the following granular roles:

• sn_vul.app_update_assignment_group
• sn_vul.app_update_assigned_to
• sn_vul.app_manage_manual_avits
• sn_vul.app_manage_pen_test_request_config
• itil
• sn_vul.app_read_all
• sn_vul.app_manage_pen_test_request
• sn_vul.app_update_state

For more information about these roles, see Application Vulnerability Response user groups and roles.

Starting with v19.0 of Vulnerability Response, if you are using the Veracode Vulnerability Integration, the penetration assessment tests in the Veracode Vulnerability Integration are manual findings from Veracode. They are not linked to any penetration test assessment requests you configure in Application Vulnerability Response. For more information about penetration test assessments from Veracode, see the Veracode Vulnerability Integration.

Life cycle of penetration testing

As an application owner, you can request the ethical hacking team for a penetration test assessment of your application. The ethical hacking team acts on this request and creates penetration test findings. These findings are manually-created Application Vulnerable Items (AVIs).

The penetration testing workflow covers the penetration testing life cycle from raising the testing request to resolving the findings of the ethical hacking team.

Requesting a penetration test assessment

Starting with v19.0, you can create new requests or copy existing requests at All > Penetration Test Assessment Requests > All.

Prior to v19.0, as the application owner, you can request a penetration test assessment for your application using the ITSM service catalog.

Reviewing the penetration test assessment request

The ethical hacking team reviews and assesses the application and the scope of the penetration test assessment request, and adds it to the existing backlog.

Preparing an environment

The ethical hacking team then sends a request to the application owner to provide an environment for them to start testing. Once the environment is ready, the application owner informs the ethical hacking team.

For more information about configuring test requests, see Configure penetration testing.

Testing and reporting the penetration test findings

The ethical hacking team tests the application and reports the findings to the application owner. The ethical hacking team also defines the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the penetration test findings using the remediation target date. These findings are the manually-created AVIs. The application owner in turn reviews the AVIs created by the ethical hacking team. They plan the fixes and assign them to the application team.

Note:

Remediation target rules do not apply to the penetration test findings.

The ethical hacking team can create a library of Application Vulnerability Entries (AVEs) and reuse them while reporting the AVIs. They can also track the status of the penetration test findings.

Fixing and validating the penetration test findings

After the penetration test findings are fixed and resolved by the application team, the fixes are validated manually and closed by the ethical hacking team.

Application Vulnerability Management reports

Use the reports available on the Application Vulnerability Management PA dashboard to track the penetration test findings.

Figure 1. Penetration testing life cycle