Lecture 13. Security Assessment and Testing
Lecture 13. Security Assessment and Testing
and Testing
Information System Security
Vulnerability Assessment
A vulnerability assessment is performed to identify, evaluate, quantify,
and prioritize security weaknesses in an application or system.
Additionally, a vulnerability assessment provides remediation steps to
mitigate specific vulnerabilities that are identified in the environment
Conducting Security Control Testing
Vulnerability Assessment
There are three general types of vulnerability assessments:
» Port scan (not intensive)
» Vulnerability scan (more intensive)
» Penetration test (most intensive)
Conducting Security Control Testing
» Log Review
Reviewing your various security logs on a regular basis (ideally,
daily) is a critical step in security control testing. Unfortunately, this
important task often ranks only slightly higher than updating
documentation on many administrators’ to-do lists. Log reviews often
happen only after an incident has occurred, but that’s not the time to
discover that your logging is incomplete or insufficient.
Conducting Security Control Testing
» Code Review
Code review and testing (sometimes known as peer review) involves
systematically examining application source code to identify bugs,
mistakes, inefficiencies, and security vulnerabilities in software
programs. Online software repositories, such as Mercurial and Git,
enable software developers to manage source code in a
collaborative development environment.
Conducting Security Control Testing
» Misusecase Testing
The opposite of use case testing (in which normal or expected
behavior in a system or application is defined and tested),
abuse/misuse case testing is the process of performing unintended
and malicious actions in a system or application to produce abnormal
or unexpected behavior and thereby identify potential vulnerabilities.
Conducting Security Control Testing
» interface Testing
Interface testing focuses on the interface between different systems
and components. It ensures that functions (such as data transfer and
control between systems or components) perform correctly and as
expected. Interface testing also verifies that any execution errors are
handled properly and do not expose any potential security
vulnerabilities
Conducting Security Control Testing
» interface Testing
Examples of interfaces tested include
» Application programming interfaces (APIs)
» Web services
» Transaction processing gateways
» Physical interfaces, such as keypads, keyboard/mouse/display,
and device switches and indicators
Conducting Security Control Testing
» Comliance Check
In many industries, it’s not enough to be secure; it’s also necessary
to be compliant with various laws, standards, and other types of
obligations. For IT, security, and privacy-related matters, information
security personnel often perform various types of compliance checks
to ensure that organizations are doing what is specifically required of
them