DAST v. SAST: Which one is better?

Earlier, security and privacy concerns were often used to be after-development activities, or they were ignored altogether. The ever-evolving threat landscape has definitely changed this position taken by the organizations and now, they are indeed concerned about the security issues associated with their application or software being developed. Or in other words, organizations are now ready to identify vulnerabilities in their products by themselves before they are exploited by an attacker.
In order to perform security testing, one will find two different strategies – dynamic application security testing (DAST), and static application security testing (SAST). Both of these methodologies assist an organization in finding vulnerabilities in their application so that chances of an information security incident are minimized.

SAST v. DAST – Differences

The differences pertaining to SAST and DAST with respect to various parameters are shown in the table given below.

Which one is right for your organization?

Our experts are often asked this question by our clients as to which of these methodologies is right for their organization.Here, it must be understood that either of these methodologies is not an alternative for another. Both these technologies work in tandem and they must be performed together to get the best possible results. For example, SAST finds errors in coding while DAST finds runtime errors. Even though SAST tools generate a relatively higher number of false positives,they are still quite popular among the development teams as they can find the flaws and write lines of code simultaneously. DAST, on the other hand, determines whether or not a function call is behaving as it should be.
Lately, a term – Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) – has emerged which combines essential elements of both DAST as well as SAST in order to address their shortcomings effectively. We will be exploring IAST in the upcoming articles. data- Meanwhile, do check out 3 Opensource Tools for DAST.

Author

Ann Chesbrough