OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is an open-source web application security testing tool developed by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). It’s widely used by security professionals to identify vulnerabilities in web applications during development or testing phases.
Key Features:
- Automated Scanning: ZAP has automated scanners that can quickly identify security flaws in web applications, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and insecure configurations.
- Intercepting Proxy: It acts as a proxy server between the user and a web application, allowing security testers to monitor, modify, or manipulate requests and responses to identify potential vulnerabilities.
- Spidering: ZAP includes a spidering tool to crawl a website, mapping out all its pages, links, and resources to identify potential attack surfaces.
- Passive Scanning: It performs passive scanning by observing traffic between the browser and the web server without actively attacking the system. This helps detect issues like missing security headers.
- Active Scanning: The tool also allows for active scanning, where it attempts to exploit vulnerabilities to assess their severity and exploitability.
- Extensibility: ZAP supports plugins and custom scripts, making it highly customizable for different use cases.
- Reporting: ZAP generates detailed reports, highlighting detected vulnerabilities, which can be shared with development teams for remediation.
ZAP is a valuable tool for both beginners and advanced security testers. Its rich set of features and flexibility makes it an important part of a web application’s security toolkit.
