The Top 7 Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) Tools
Discover the top IAST tools. Explore features such as real-time code analysis, application behavior monitoring, and real-time feedback.
Written by Caitlin Harris
Technical Review by Laura Iannini
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) tools (also known as “grey-box testing” tools) scan applications and APIs for vulnerabilities in real time. Unlike traditional application scanning methods, IAST solutions complete their testing while the application is being run— “interacted” with—by either a real user or an automated test runner. The IAST tool tests the code behind all of the features and functionality that the tester interacts with, then reports back to the DevOps team in real time with details on any vulnerabilities it finds—including details on exactly where the vulnerability is in the source code, for fast, targeted remediation.
Most IAST tools scan code that’s being used in production, after the application has already been built. However, some IAST solutions offer integrated development environment (IDE) integration, which enables DevOps teams to “shift their security left” and test their code during the development stage, when vulnerabilities and bugs are often cheaper and easier to fix.
By integrating IAST into the development lifecycle at any stage, DevOps teams can discover and fix any security vulnerabilities—such as SQL injection, API keys being hardcoded in cleartext, or unencrypted connections—before their applications go to market. This makes the vulnerabilities much less costly and time-consuming to fix. It also helps prevent any future users of the application from falling victim to a data breach caused by an attacker exploiting a vulnerability in the app.
In this article, we’ll explore the top IAST tools designed to help you identify and remediate vulnerabilities in the applications you’re building. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including vulnerability scanning, application behavior monitoring, real-time feedback, and integrations.
Invicti
Invicti offers a combined dynamic (DAST) and true interactive (IAST) scanning solution to enhance application security. Their DAST scanner offers comprehensive vulnerability coverage, accurate scanning, and deep contextual insight into each vulnerability. The IAST sensor, Invicti Shark, works alongside the DAST scanner to improve vulnerability detection while reducing false positives. This helps save developers valuable time and effort.
Invicti’s IAST sensor provides better visibility into the backend of web applications, including unlinked and hidden files, by being deployed within the runtime environment. This enables more comprehensive mapping and testing of every page, reducing potential attack points. Invicti also takes steps to eliminate false positives through their Proof-Based Scanning™ feature, which verifies identified vulnerabilities as real and exploitable.
The solution helps developers locate exact vulnerability locations faster by providing detailed information about the problem, often down to the specific file name and line number. This allows developers to focus more on product development and less on locating security issues. Finally, Invicti can access local configuration files to identify misconfigurations and suggest best practice recommendations to prevent future vulnerabilities.
Invicti
Acunetix
Acunetix’s flagship vulnerability scanning platform is a DAST solution (black-box scanner) but transforms into an IAST solution (grey-box scanner) with the addition of Acutenix’s AcuSensor component. This solution works for applications written in Node.js, PHP, Java (including Spring framework), and ASP.NET.
Acutenix IAST with AcuSensor scans every file, including hidden and unlinked ones, providing users with increased visibility into the backend of their web applications. Acunetix can also import API definition files and links to test APIs using REST, SOAP, or GraphQL architecture.
By connecting to the code interpreter or compiler, AcuSensor can precisely identify the exact line of source code or location in a stack trace, making it easier for developers to fix vulnerabilities. AcuSensor also provides a full directory listing of the web application to ensure complete scanning, including hidden and unlinked files.
AcuSensor offers businesses a reliable way to protect their web applications from potential threats.
Acunetix
Checkmarx IAS
Checkmarx IAST is a dynamic and continuous security testing solution designed to integrate seamlessly into DevOps, QA automation, and CI/CD pipelines. By automating analysis during the Test/QA phase, it efficiently detects vulnerabilities and threats in running applications—including SQL injection, XSS injection, and sensitive data leakage—without causing delays in the software development life cycle. Checkmarx IAST is compatible with microservices-based applications and provides real-time feedback and comprehensive analysis of custom code, libraries, frameworks, and runtime data flow.
Checkmarx IAST has a strong focus on API security, ensuring coverage of OWASP Top 10 API Security vulnerabilities. It discovers, classifies, and documents APIs in addition to monitoring their usage and authorization. Designed with developers in mind, Checkmarx IAST offers detailed source code analysis to facilitate swift remediation of potential vulnerabilities. By leveraging existing functional testing processes, Checkmarx IAST eliminates the need for separate security testing, resulting in zero-scan time. The solution also integrates smoothly with Checkmarx SCA, allowing for automated SCA scans and the display of third-party vulnerabilities during an IAST scan.
Checkmarx IAST can be deployed both on-premises in a private data center or hosted in a private tenant in AWS, offering flexible deployment options. The platform is highly customizable, allowing for custom query creation and tuning to optimize results, and its seamless integration into existing workflows ensures a secure development process without disruption.
Checkmarx IAS
Contrast Assess
Contrast Security offers a leading Interactive Application Security Testing solution for development teams looking to secure their code. Their Assess platform continuously detects, prioritizes, and offers guidance on removing software vulnerabilities with notable accuracy, efficiency, scalability, and coverage.
Contrast Assess offers a live architecture and flow view, which allows organizations to visualize application architecture, code trees, and data flow information. This feature provides in-depth visualization of application components and helps developers pinpoint and rectify vulnerabilities faster. Furthermore, it assists in threat modeling remediation.
Contrast Security also offers code-level remediation guidance through its innovative Security Trace format, which clearly identifies vulnerabilities and explains how they function. This empowers developers to address these issues without extensive security expertise. The application attack intelligence feature maps the URLs and routes of software executed during the testing phase of the SDLC. This enables security teams to maximize the solution’s coverage and assists developers in evaluating the overall effectiveness of their testing practices.
Contrast Assess
Fortify on Demand by OpenText
Fortify on Demand by OpenText is a cloud-based application security service that helps businesses identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in their applications. It offers an interactive web portal for scheduling security assessments and provides results through dashboards and reports.
Fortify on Demand offers multiple types of security assessment that enable it to scan applications for vulnerabilities at multiple layers. Static application security assessments help developers detect and eliminate vulnerabilities in the source, binary, or bytecode. Open-source software composition assessments analyze third-party components for potential security risks, using natural language processing to monitor GitHub commits, advisory websites, and other sources for new vulnerabilities. Dynamic web application security assessments use automated and manual techniques to analyze complex web applications and services.
With Fortify on Demand Connect, users can also establish site-to-site VPN connections for internally facing web applications. The service also offers dynamic API security assessments and comprehensive mobile application security testing across the entire mobile ecosystem.
Fortify on Demand is designed to simplify the application security process. As part of this, the platform includes over 100 hours of role-based secure development training materials. Fortify on Demand also offers robust support options, including 24/7 chat support and helpdesk ticketing, along with dedicated customer success managers for larger clients.
Fortify on Demand by OpenText
HCL AppScan
HCL AppScan offers Interactive Application Security Testing to monitor various activities that interact with an organization’s code during runtime. This enables development teams to identify any potential security vulnerabilities quickly and accurately within their code, allowing for timely remediation.
HCL AppScan’s API discovery feature detects and catalogs all internal APIs used in an application, while gathering additional information from scans of open-source packages. The platform’s auto-issue correlation features reduce the number of vulnerabilities and remediation tasks by grouping issues together, helping prioritize SAST findings for remediation. HCL AppScan also features patented Java and .NET deployment solutions, which require less configuration, allowing for faster set-up and deployment.
A key benefit of HCL AppScan is its ability to eliminate false positives. It achieves this through advanced algorithms that track information flow within an application. These algorithms perform additional checks and replicate code flow in real-time, attempting to attack the application in various ways. This ensures that HCL AppScan IAST detects any custom sanitization code written by the organization, thus reducing false positives in the final report.
HCL AppScan
Synopsys Seeker
Synopsys Seeker is an IAST solution that offers extensive visibility into a company’s web app security posture and identifies vulnerability trends against compliance standards such as OWASP Top 10, PCI DSS, GDPR, CAPEC, and CWE/SANS Top 25. By integrating seamlessly into DevOps CI/CD workflows, Seeker enables continuous application security testing and verification, prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk.
To achieve this, Synopsys Seeker uses patented methods and active verification to process requests and minimize false positives, contributing to improved productivity and reduced business risk. The solution uniquely tracks sensitive data, ensuring secure handling and proper encryption in various storage locations. Seeker supports large-scale enterprise security requirements while providing accurate results without extensive configuration. For developers, it offers detailed vulnerability descriptions, remediation advice, stack trace information, and identifies vulnerable lines of code to help non-security experts.
Seeker is suitable for microservices-based app development as it analyzes data flow between microservices to assess the system as a whole. It also features an industry-first sensitive data tracking capability, helping organizations achieve compliance with standards and regulations like PCI DSS and GDPR.
Synopsys Seeker
FAQs
Everything You Need To Know About Interactive Application Security Testing Tools (FAQs)
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST), also known as “grey-box testing”, is the process of testing an application or API for vulnerabilities in real time, while the app is being run by either a real user or an automated test runner that’s “interacting” with the app’s features and functionality. Most IAST solutions are designed to test web applications and APIs, rather than desktop or mobile applications.
Because IAST solutions analyze vulnerabilities in real-time, they can easily be integrated into a DevOps team’s CI/CD pipeline, without adding any extra time onto it. By carrying out IAST, DevOps teams can discover and fix any vulnerabilities before the app goes to market. This means that such vulnerabilities are much easier and less costly to fix. It also ensures that the application is secure before anyone actually deploys it—helping to prevent future users of the app from falling victim to potential data breaches.
Most traditional application security testing methods only test code from the outside, or they focus on static analysis—performing tests and scans on the app while it’s idle, rather than while it’s being run. However, testing an app from within and while it’s running—as IAST tools do—provides three main benefits:
- It enables DevOps teams to scan code that’s being used in production, helping to avoid false positives that may have already been addressed in another part of the code base
- Some IAST tools also come with integrated development environment (IDE) integrations, which enable DevOps teams to scan their code in development as well as in production; this enables them to “shift left” their security checks to an earlier stage in the development lifecycle, when issues are often easier and cheaper to fix
- IAST solutions are able to link vulnerability findings to the exact point in the source code where the vulnerability is, allowing for quick identification and remediation
However, IAST does also have some drawbacks. If an IAST solution doesn’t offer an IDE plugin, it can only test applications that have already been built. Additionally, IAST is programming language-dependent, so if your organization uses a less popular technology, it may not be compatible with an IAST tool.
Finally, IAST tools only scan code that’s actually executed during the test. This means that, if your tester forgets to test some functionality, the code behind that functionality may still have vulnerabilities in it when the code goes to market. To avoid this, we recommend deploying your IAST tool in a QA environment that runs automated, functional tests. This can help avoid human error and ensure that all of the app’s functionality is tested.
IAST tools scan the code of an application as it’s being executed. At their core, IAST tools are built upon sensor modules, which keep track of an application’s behavior while the tester is interacting with it. These sensors have access to the code itself, data flows and control flows, system configuration data, back-end connection data, and any web components. If the IAST tool detects a vulnerability within any of these areas—such as potential for an SQL injection, API keys being hardcoded in cleartext, or unencrypted connections—it alerts the DevOps team so they can quickly locate and remediate it.
There are type ways of implementing IAST sensors: you can either use invasive sensors, or non-invasive sensors. Most IAST tools use invasive sensors, which require the developer to make changes to the source code (a process known as “instrumentation”) in order for the sensors to work. This means that the organization has to maintain two separate versions of their source code—one with sensors and one without—which can lead to organizational complexity.
Non-invasive sensors, on the other hand, are not places in the source code, so don’t require the source code to be modified for them to work. Instead, these sensors attach to the server-side runtime environment and analyze the code as it’s executed by the web server or application server.
There’s one more layer of complexity to IAST solution—just as there are two types of IAST sensor, there are also two types of IAST itself: active and passive IAST. Active IAST is often called “DAST-induced IAST”, because it requires a Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tool to work. The DAST tool activates the IAST sensors (which, with active IAST, are usually invasive sensors) to validate vulnerabilities that are found during the DAST tool’s attack simulations, which are run by an application security analyst. This type of IAST provides very accurate results, but it cannot be automated and requires its own testing environment. Active IAST tools also often don’t collate IAST and DAST data. For these reasons, active IAST isn’t suitable for large-scale or fast-paced DevOps environments.
Passive IAST, also known as “self-sufficient IAST”, was created to overcome the obstacles presented by active IAST. Instead of running dedicated tests or simulated attacks, it leverages all forms of functional testing to collect vulnerability data. This means that passive IAST can be manual or automatic—making it well-suited to fast-paced DevOps environments.
There are a few key features that you should look for in a strong IAST solution:
- A low false positive rate. Your IAST tool should only scan code that’s actually being used in production. This will help it to avoid false positives; some vulnerability scanning technologies scan code across different codebases, which opens up the opportunity for them to flag issues that have already been fixed elsewhere. By scanning code in production, your chosen IAST tool will only highlight genuine issues to you, helping save developer time and resources.
- Fast, automatic testing. Because IAST tools are usually used to test the security of applications that have already been built, it’s important that they’re able to scan large amount of code quickly. To enable this, you should look for a solution that provides automatic testing, with options to scan only new code or code that’s been edited since the last scan.
- Easy deployment. Your IAST solution should be ready to deploy out-of-the-box, with little to no need for custom configuration so that you can start scanning straight away. Deployment methods may include fully automated, manual, or Docker-based deployment.
- Real-time results. Your chosen IAST tool should provide feedback on any discovered vulnerabilities within seconds of finding them. This helps your developers to fix any issues quickly, so that your code is exposed to those vulnerabilities for as little time as possible.
- Vulnerability location pinpointing. IAST solutions have access to the application’s code, runtime control and data flow, memory and stack trace information, HTTP actions, and use of libraries and frameworks, they can pinpoint the exact source of any vulnerabilities they identify. The best IAST tools feed this information back to the developers so that they can locate and remediate the issue more quickly.
- CI/CD integration. Your IAST tool should integrate easily with your CI/CD tools, including standard build, test, QA, and bug tracking tools, without you having to spend lots of time configuring it or tuning it to reduce false positives. Depending on your specific use case, you may also wish to look for a solution that offers web APIs that enable you to integrate it into enterprise-specific tools, such as Jenkins builds.
- Compatibility with your application’s architecture. Your chosen solution should be able to support the architecture your application is built on, be it microservices-based, cloud-based, or standard architecture. If your application uses microservices, you should look for an IAST tool that allows API testing to ensure the security of those connections.
- Compatibility with multiple testing methods. Finally, your chosen IAST tool should be compatible with automated testing methods, manual QA/dev tests, unit testing, web crawlers, and any other testing methods you use.
Written By
Caitlin Harris is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.
Technical Review
Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.