OWASP ZAP

Finding a good web security tool that is open-source and free to use can be challenging. OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy, now developed as ZAP by Checkmarx) is one of the most popular web application security projects. This security scanner runs active testing against the target application and identifies potential security threats.

One of the strengths of OWASP ZAP is that it can be controlled via its API and run in an automated manner. For regular security testing, penetration testers can run an automated scan to find vulnerabilities in each page of the web application. The scanner reports every issue it finds with a risk level and details, so developers can fix it.

OWASP ZAP helps in manual and automated security testing to strengthen your web applications so they can safely operate on the internet.

Features:

• A great tool for penetration testers and security analysts to find vulnerabilities in web applications.
• You can perform active and passive scans to test your developing applications. Active scans send real attacks and can create or delete data to catch potential vulnerabilities.
• It offers a range of options for security testing and automation, including a spider, an AJAX spider, a fuzzer and the Automation Framework.
• OWASP ZAP supports different authentication formats, including script-based, JSON-based, and form-based authentication.
• WebSocket support lets you intercept, inspect and fuzz the messages exchanged between client and server, so issues in WebSocket communication can be found as well.
• The installation is simple; the Windows and Linux versions need Java 17 or higher, while the macOS installer includes Java.

This highly popular penetration testing software helps security professionals by intercepting, displaying, and modifying web application requests. To search folders on web servers, you can use dictionary lists. It also allows you to retrieve links and important URLs. Engineers use this tool, including its Docker images, in CI/CD pipelines to identify potential risks in the application.

In OWASP ZAP, you can perform two types of scans: active and passive. Active scan is a more thorough way to check vulnerabilities, but it actually attacks the application, so it should only be run against sites you are allowed to test. On the other hand, passive scans do not change anything in your application and are low-risk. ZAP is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and can be extended with add-ons from its marketplace, so you can install OWASP ZAP to reinforce your application security.