Services / Testing
Dynamic Application Security Testing
Test the running application, on every release, not once a year.
The problem
You ship twice a week. The penetration test happens once a year. Between those two facts sits roughly a hundred releases that nobody security-tested at all, and the next test will find something that shipped eight months ago.
The method.
Test the application as it runs, authenticated
Unauthenticated scanning tests the login page and nothing else. DAST is configured with valid credentials for each role and each tenant, with a working authentication and session flow, so the scan reaches the part of the application where the risk actually lives.
Drive coverage from the API contract
Modern applications are APIs behind a client. Coverage is driven from the OpenAPI or GraphQL schema, plus recorded traffic for the endpoints the schema omits, so the scan exercises real parameters, real payload shapes and real content types rather than crawling links on a page.
Test what an attacker tests
Injection, cross-site scripting, SSRF, insecure deserialisation, mass assignment, path traversal, authentication and session weaknesses, and, with multi-tenant credentials configured, object-level authorisation across tenants. Mapped to the OWASP Top 10 and the OWASP API Security Top 10.
Wire it into the release pipeline
Full authenticated scan against staging on a defined cadence, with a faster targeted scan on the paths a release touches. Findings above an agreed severity gate the release. Testing that happens after deployment is testing that reports problems your customers already have.
Triage before anything reaches an engineer
Raw DAST output is noisy, and a noisy queue is an ignored queue. Every finding is manually validated and reproduced before it is raised. Engineers receive confirmed issues with the exact request, not a scanner export.
What is Dynamic Application Security Testing?
DAST tests a running application from the outside, sending real requests to real endpoints and observing the responses, without access to source code. It finds vulnerabilities that only exist at runtime (injection, cross-site scripting, SSRF, authentication and session weaknesses, and authorisation failures) in the deployed system as it actually behaves, including its configuration and its dependencies.
Does DAST replace a penetration test?
No. DAST runs continuously and catches known vulnerability classes on every release; a penetration test is performed by a human who understands your business logic and can chain findings into demonstrated impact. DAST covers the hundred releases between annual tests. The penetration test finds the things a machine cannot reason about. Enterprise customers and auditors ask for both, for different reasons.
Why must DAST be authenticated?
Because an unauthenticated scan only ever reaches the login page. Almost every serious vulnerability in a SaaS product lives behind authentication: in the authorisation model, in tenant isolation, in admin functionality and in the API. A DAST configuration without valid credentials for each role and tenant produces a clean report about the part of the application nobody attacks.