Tool for Scanning Website for Vulnerabilities

Question

I've seen several questions on SO about this, but none of them quite fit what i'm looking for. I've got an ASP.NET Site on my machine that i recently finished, but i'm a little worried about Security. I'm pretty sure I've managed it pretty well, but there's always an offchance i've missed something.

So, I'm looking for a tool that meets the following reqs

1. Scans a locally hosted (as in, on the same machine as the tool) website for vulnerabilities
2. Can be installed (i.e, no web based stuff)
3. (elaborating on #1)... tests ASP.NET (Web Forms, but MVC would be nice too) for SQL or XSS problems. (I figure XSS is hard to test, but SQL injection should be easier to find)

Thanks! Lemme know if i'm not specific enough or if this is better suited for Webmasters SE.

Answer 1

There are a few scanning tools around, some of which are open source, which is nice. The exploits you are talking about are technology agnostic - any app could suffer from them regardless of whether it's .net, java, ruby, etc. This makes testing for them slightly easier. Also, SQL injection and XSS bugs are usually application specific, which makes automagically testing for them harder.

The best thing you can do is not be worried about security, but take specific steps to address issues. Security should always be designed into your application. So carry out a code review on your app. Look for specific things.

• Do you have any in-line SQL? Do you modify it any way? Are you using parameters?
• Are you escaping any user input before you use it?

The above 2 steps will eliminate most SQL injection/XSS bugs. There are other issues to do with your server setup. Vulnerability scanning tools usually know most of these and can test for them.