How AcuSensor enriches vulnerability reports in Acunetix Premium
Acunetix Premium is a dynamic application security testing tool (DAST). It probes the entire running application, so it can test the entire attack surface and find all the vulnerabilities that an attacker could. Even so, it still has no access to the source code, so it cannot truly pinpoint identified weaknesses.
This document shows how the combination of out-of-the-box Dynamic Application Security Testing and AcuSensor’s Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) technology enriches the scan reports.
Benefits of using AcuSensor
- When you install and use the AcuSensor, Acunetix becomes an IAST solution (grey-box scanner) in addition to being a DAST scanner (black-box scanner).
- The AcuSensor works together with the main vulnerability scanning engine to extend the DAST capabilities of the Acunetix vulnerability scanning engine.
- AcuSensor continuously provides additional information about vulnerabilities and the environment itself.
With AcuSensor, Acunetix can pinpoint many vulnerabilities right down to the line number and provide additional details for security teams.
TIP: To get the best out of AcuSensor, install it on your staging servers or virtual machines as a part of CI/CD pipeline. |
How AcuSensor enriches vulnerability reports
AcuSensor provides detailed information about vulnerabilities showing:
- Source file
- Line number
- The function that has been called with the payload
- Payload
While AcuSensor extends the capabilities of the main vulnerability engine, it also runs its own attacks to identify other vulnerabilities. AcuSensor gets all hidden files within the application. From there, Acunetix adds these files to the link pool so that it can crawl and attack them.
Critical-severity vulnerabilities
AcuSensor provides detailed information about those critical vulnerabilities:
- SQL Injection
- Boolean Based SQL Injection
- Blind SQL Injection
- Command Injection
- Blind Command Injection
- Code Evaluation (PHP)
- Code Evaluation (ASP)
High-severity vulnerabilities
AcuSensor provides detailed information and detects the following high-severity vulnerabilities:
- Local File Inclusion
- Arbitrary File Creation Detected
- Arbitrary File Deletion Detected
- ASP.NET Tracing Is Enabled
Medium-severity vulnerabilities
AcuSensor provides detailed information and detects the following medium-severity vulnerabilities:
- HTTP Header Injection
- PHP enable_dl Is Enabled
- PHP register_globals Is Enabled
- PHP session.use_trans_sid Is Enabled
- ASP.NET Cookieless Authentication Is Enabled
- ASP.NET Cookieless Session State Is Enabled
- ASP.NET Custom Errors Is Disabled
- ASP.NET Login Credentials Stored In Plain Text
- ASP.NET ValidateRequest Is Globally Disabled
- ASP.NET: Failure To Require SSL For Authentication Cookies
Low-severity vulnerabilities
AcuSensor provides detailed information and detects the following low-severity vulnerabilities:
- PHP allow_url_fopen Is Enabled
- PHP allow_url_include Is Enabled
- PHP display_errors Is Enabled
- PHP open_basedir Is Not Configured
- ASP.NET ViewStateUserKey Is Not Set
Additionally, AcuSensor provides information about ASP.NET Debugging Enabled, which a bad actor might use to attack your application.
TIP: IAST attacks in Acunetix Premium are enabled by default. If you want to scan your application with a customized scan policy, make sure you include IAST attacks into the custom scan policy so AcuSensor can run its own attacks as well. If not included, AcuSensor falls back to enriching existing engines. |
How to install AcuSensor
If you want to use AcuSensor with your web application, download and install the sensors on the server side. You do not need to change the code of your application to use it while scanning for vulnerabilities. For detailed information about the process, refer to the Introduction to deploying AcuSensor document.