OWASP ZAP – the Firefox of web security tools
My name is Simon Bennetts, and I am the ZAP Project Leader; there
is also an international group of volunteers who develop and support it.
Future posts on the ZAP blog
will describe the features that ZAP provides and how you can use them,
but this post will concentrate on the philosophy behind ZAP.
Some of the ideals that have driven ZAP are listed below and will be expanded upon in the rest of this post:
- help users develop and apply application security skills
- build a competitive, open source, and community oriented platform
- provide an extensible platform for testing
- designed to be easy to use
- raise the bar for other security tools
Helping users learn about Application Security
Unlike many security tools ZAP is designed to be used by people new to application security as well as security professionals.
My background is in development, and I started
playing around with the Paros Proxy (from which I forked ZAP) as a way
to learn about security tools. Helping people to learn about application
security has been, and will remain, an essential goal for ZAP.
The open nature of ZAP is key here – users can
delve into the code to see how it works. Anyone who thinks they can make
an improvement has the opportunity to implement those changes, feed
them back and be credited for them. Developers can work on ZAP to help
them learn about security, and security people can work on ZAP to help
them learn about coding.
An Open Source, Community based project
Like all OWASP projects, ZAP is open source and
completely free to use. This means that there is no ‘pro’ version, so
there is no incentive for us to hold back features for the ‘paid-for’
version. ZAP is also a community based project, which is an important
distinction when compared with some other tools.
There are many security tools that are open
source but are still tightly controlled by one individual or company.
While a user can see how these products work it is often difficult to
change them or influence their direction.
Anyone can get involved with the ZAP development –
once someone has shown that they can produce good quality code and
conform to ZAP guidelines then they can get commit access!
There are plenty of opportunities for non coders to get involved
too – testing, documentation, training videos, translating – all
contributions are welcomed and credited.
An Extensible platform for testing web applications
In addition to improving the core feature set for
ZAP, we are working to ensure that as much of ZAP functionality is
implemented as extensions or addons, which can easily be added to
existing ZAP releases. This means that new features can be added
dynamically without having to wait for full ZAP releases, and also means
that we can accommodate features that will only appeal to a small
subset of our users.
The ZAP community is very supportive of people
who want to learn about coding or security, and we have just benefited
from 3 students producing excellent enhancements to ZAP as part of the Google Summer of Code.
Ease of use as a design goal
We realize that developers and functional testers
will probably spend a relatively small amount of time using security
tools, so we want ZAP to be as intuitive as possible.
But we try to maintain a balance between making things as simple as possible while at the same time not over simplifying them.
While there is no ‘big red button’ in ZAP which will solve all of your security problems,
ZAP provides a set of automated tools which will help individuals assess the security of applications.
ZAP also provides a set of manual tools which can
be used by people with more knowledge, which is one of the reasons it
has been so enthusiastically adopted by professional pentesters.
Inexperienced users can start off using the automated tools and
gradually use more and more of the manual features as they improve their
knowledge of application security.
Raising the bar for security tools
Another way ZAP can help application security in
general is by raising the bar for other security tools, commercial or
otherwise. Other products are free to reuse our source code (with
acknowledgement;) and also free to copy or be ‘inspired’ by features
that are implemented in ZAP.
In fact we welcome such reuse as it will provide the following benefits:
- improving other tools, which increases user choice
- broadens the availability of effective security tools
- allows feature parity across tools which will drive innovation and competition
Conclusion
In conclusion, ZAP is a free, open-source community developed tool
aimed at making the online world more secure. Anyone can get involved
developing the core engine, or by creating addons which have full access
to the core functionality. And that will probably sound vaguely
familiar as its very close to the philosophy behind Mozilla Firefox.
Its why I’m working for Mozilla as a security automation engineer, and the justification for this blog’s title:)
If you have any interest in application security then you should
download ZAP and try it out. And if you would like to learn more, or
help to make ZAP better then please get in touch with me.
Simon Bennetts
OWASP ZAP Project Lead
Mozilla Security Automation Engineer
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