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Play With Fire…and You Just Might Learn


Watchfire’s AppScan Enterprise 5 focuses on reducing complexity in app security

By Jeff Feinman
March 15, 2007 — 
With the release of AppScan Enterprise 5, Watchfire claims to have put bewildering security vulnerabilities into layman’s terms for developers.

Released last month, AppScan Enterprise 5 is the latest version of the company’s Web-based security solution for Web applications. AppScan Enterprise provides vulnerability scanning, reporting and remediation capabilities for Web applications. The newest version introduces QuickScan, a new testing tool that simplifies security assessments for developers.

Dave Grant, vice president of security product strategies for Watchfire, said, “We’ve implemented new functionality that makes it as dead simple as you can make it for developers to scan [their code]. We’ve built an interface, and a language around that interface, that makes it simple for nonsecurity experts to run a test for security applications.”

Another new feature of AppScan Enterprise 5 is integration with Watchfire’s computer-based training program, in which an organization’s executives can monitor employee progress and course completion rates. In addition, AppScan Enterprise 5 now can work with Fortify Software’s SCA Suite to show overlapping vulnerabilities on both the source-code and the application levels.

GENERATES TASK LIST
QuickScan presents a Developer Task List that the company claims can enable developers to quickly understand what needs to be fixed to make a Web application secure. With QuickScan, Grant said, a security professional can set up the necessary scans that need to be run, and the developer directs AppScan to test the application. AppScan scans the application, and then generates the Developer Task List for QuickScan.

As an example of the developer-oriented results that QuickScan provides, Grant offered the following: “Developers would be told to ‘filter out hazardous characters from user input field,’ and then there would be an example of what those hazardous characters are, or [they would be given the recommendation] ‘install the ASP.NET patch or module’ instead of telling them about a cross-site scripting problem or SQL injection problem. Most people don’t even know what application security is, let alone how to write secure code, so we have to bridge that gap.”

AppScan Enterprise 5 has a number of new reporting features, including a more flexible framework that allows better searching and filtering, and more granular controls to lock down scanning and report access to protect sensitive security data. The offering also has a brand-new GUI that is better suited to developers, according to the company.


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