WebApp Sec mailing list archives

Re: Web Application Scanners Comparison


From: romain <r () fuckthespam com>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:00:08 -0500

Well, I'm wondering who can take this seriously.

- What policies did you use for the tools? Did you create them?

- Any specific tuning?

- What about the application coverage (not only links)? Maybe a tool didn't find a vulnerability because it didn't cover this part of the application. Should it then get -5, since it's a crawler problem?

- The scoring system is over simplistic and assume that a web apps scanner is a web security fuzzer. Rating the coverage of the application is, most of the time, needed if you want serious results. If a tool don't cover a part of the application and generates a false-negative, I don't think it should count as much as if it cover the application and also generates a false-negative: since you focus on rating the vulnerability finding, you have no idea what you are scoring here -- the badness of the crawler/parser or the badness of the attack engine.

- You said you use different type of technologies, correct, but all the applications seems to be the same type (CMSs/Blogs/Forums). Would have been interesting in using different things too (document management, "ERP", stuff like that).

The JavaScript part is very interesting though.

Cheers,

--Romain
http://rgaucher.info

anantasec wrote:
Hi all,

In the past weeks, I've performed an evaluation/comparison of three
popular web vulnerability scanners.This evaluation was ordered by a
penetration testing company that will remain anonymous. The vendors
were not contacted during or after the evaluation.

The applications (web scanners) included in this evaluation are:
- Acunetix WVS version 6.0 (Build 20081217)
- IBM Rational AppScan version 7.7.620 Service Pack 2
- HP WebInspect version 7.7.869

I've tested 13 web applications (some of them containing a lot of
vulnerabilities), 3 demo applications provided by the vendors
(testphp.acunetix.com, demo.testfire.net, zero.webappsecurity.com) and
I've done some tests to verify Javascript execution capabilities.

In total, 16 applications were tested. I've tried to cover all the
major platforms, therefore I have applications in PHP, ASP, ASP.NET
and Java.

The report can be found at http://drop.io/anantasecfiles/
The full URL to the PDF document:
http://drop.io/download/497f0f4e/c1d8b2966f85fb8549a18cbe2d789224ea665f45/759c3010-ce68-012b-dcee-f407c7ff11c2/9eeb1f00-cea5-012b-aa7b-f219675fa758/report.pdf/report_pdf.pdf

I've included enough information in this report (the javascript files
used for testing, exact version and URL for all the tested
applications) so anybody with enough patience can verify and reproduce
the results presented here.

Therefore, I will not respond to emails for vendors. You have the
information, fix your scanners!

Best wishes & regards,
anantasec


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