How to add security checks to your manual / automation test suite

Let me tell you that you can have a basic / moderate security checks in your manual test suite by extending your test cases in two different areas :

Most of test suites if not all of them are already testing the sections mentioned above but mostly just a basic checks like if the field accepting numbers we try characters and alpha numerics. What I am suggesting here is to test any input field against major web app vulnerabilities like XSS & SQL Injection

The same case for authentication instead of trying different combinations for right / wrong usernames and passwords .You can extend your test against major web app vulnerability like SQL Injection

XSS : XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same-origin policy.

We’re going to use demo.testfire.net as a safe place to practice on.

Example :

The field we’re going to test here is the Search field , I am assuming that we already executed test cases with character , numbers , alphanumeric and also very long characters / numbers input to validate the input boundary.

Lets try an XSS payload as input.The input will be “<ScRipT>alert(“XSS”);</ScRipT>”

According to the above screen shot it seems that the web app under test is vulnerable to XSS attacks.

XSS payloads example :

You can find XSS payload list in the following URL :
https://github.com/pgaijin66/XSS-Payloads/blob/master/payload.txt

SQL Injection : SQL injection is a code injection technique, used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution.

The element we’re going to test here is the Login form , I am assuming that we already executed test cases with valid and invalid username , password also very long characters / numbers input to validate the input boundary.

Lets try SQL Injection payload in the “username” field and any characters in the password field.

username value will be = ‘ ‘
password value will be = test

Lets try more advanced input as below

username value will be = ‘ UNION SELECT sum(columnname ) from tablename -
password value will be = test

According to the above screen shot it seems that the web app under test is vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks.

You can find SQL Injection payload list in the following URL :
https://github.com/payloadbox/sql-injection-payload-list

Conclusion :

By adding more test cases to your existing test suite you can help discover security vulnerabilities in the system under test without the need to learn a new tool.Of course it will increase the testing execution time but the benefit here is to catch those issues as soon as the testing started.

Of course this not a replacement for security testing a web app but the idea here is cover at least some basic security checks in the normal testing process.

Please share your tips, experience, comments, and questions for further enriching this topic of discussion.

Originally published at http://thetesttherapist.com on June 11, 2020.