Penetration Testing

Penetration Testing in BizTalk360

Published on : Mar 22, 2022

Category : BizTalk Server

Praveena

Author

Penetration Testing is the process of identifying security vulnerabilities in an application by evaluating the system or network with various malicious techniques. The weak points of a system are exploited in this process through an authorized simulated attack.

The purpose of this test is to secure important data from outsiders like hackers who can have unauthorized access to the system. Once the vulnerability is identified, it is used to exploit the system to gain access to sensitive information.

Pen testing can involve the attempted breaching of any number of application systems, (e.g., application protocol interfaces (APIs), frontend/backend servers) to uncover vulnerabilities, such as unsanitized inputs that are susceptible to code injection attacks.

Insights provided by the penetration test can be used to fine-tune your web application firewall security policies and patch detected vulnerabilities.

Penetration Testing

Why Penetration Testing?

It is critical for any software product to be as secure as possible in terms of data management and malicious attacks. In every software, industry data integrity and security play a major role as the information stored is very critical and must be confidentially maintained. With massive and dangerous cyber-attacks happening these days, it has become unavoidable to do penetration testing at regular intervals to protect the information systems against security breaches. Any organization needs to identify security issues present in the internal network and computers. Using this information, organizations can plan a defence against any hacking attempt. User privacy and data security are the biggest concerns nowadays. 

Penetration testing commonly focuses on the security vulnerabilities that a software may contain, few of which may be,

  • Insecure file upload
  • Directory listing
  • Broken access control
  • Absence of certificates
  • Information leaks
  • Outdated and vulnerable components and much more.
  • Pen Testing

Broken access control

Access controls define how users interact with data and resources including what they can read or edit. A broken access control vulnerability exists when a user has the ability to interact with data in a way that they don’t need. For example, if a user should only be able to read payment details but can actually edit them, this is a broken access control. Malicious actors use this vulnerability to gain unauthorized access to systems, networks, and software. They can then escalate the privileges, give the user ID additional access within the ecosystem, to negatively impact data confidentiality, integrity, or availability.

Insecure file upload

Web applications often incorporate file upload capabilities. For example, if you want to input data in bulk, you might upload a CSV file to a database. An unrestricted file upload vulnerability can be a lack of authentication/authorization when someone tries to upload a file. This means that the application fails to verify the user, giving malicious actors the ability to upload compromised files. Additionally, the application may fail to sanitize files prior to uploading, thus giving attackers a way to leave malicious content in the files, like macros that hide malware.

Additional file upload vulnerabilities include:

  • Allows all file extensions
  • Fails to authorize or authenticate users
  • Fails to scan content to ensure the file type is expected
  • Allows webserver to fetch files
  • Stores files in a publicly accessible directory

SQL Injections

A SQL injection attack specifically targets database servers, using malicious code to get the server to divulge information it normally wouldn’t. This is especially problematic if the server stores private customer information from a website or web application, such as credit card numbers, usernames and passwords (credentials), or other personally identifiable information, which are tempting and lucrative targets for an attacker.

Successful SQL injection attacks typically occur because a vulnerable application doesn’t properly sanitize inputs provided by the user, by not stripping out anything that appears to be SQL code. For example, if an application is vulnerable to an injection attack, it may be possible for an attacker to go to a website’s search box and type in code that would instruct the site’s SQL server to dump all of its stored usernames and passwords for the site. 

Penetration Testing in BizTalk360

For BizTalk360, being a web application hosted in IIS and containing information about the BizTalk artifacts, it is equally important to confirm the security of the product. With its huge customer base having footprints in various industrial sectors like insurance, medicine, resource management, penetration testing is considered as one of the phases in the release cycle.

Penetration Testing

You may be aware that every quarter there is a BizTalk360 version being released, thereby considering customer feedback and suggestions. Since BizTalk360 is hosted in the customer environment, it is secure since all the security policies would be in place before installing any third-party software in the customer end.

In addition to this, we have also taken the necessary security methods to mitigate the above-mentioned vulnerabilities. In the releases, we make sure that outdated components are updated to the latest versions. We have also received pen test reports from few of our customers, based on which the necessary measures have been added in upcoming releases make the application as secure as possible.

API security is a key component of modern web application security. API security is the process of protecting APIs from attacks. Because APIs are very commonly used, and because they enable access to sensitive software functions and data, they are becoming a primary target for attackers. 

APIs may have vulnerabilities like broken authentication and authorization, lack of rate limiting, and code injection. BizTalk360 being a web-based application, API security is one major component to be taken care of. The access to every API used is authenticated and validation message would be thrown in case of unauthorized access.

Some of the measures taken in the upcoming v10.2 release include, disabling directory listing (to be done at the customer end), using parameterized queries to avoid SQL injections, restricting file uploads with the extensions and regularly updating the components and the packages to their latest versions. All the APIs are authenticated as per the user access.

Validation of the inputs. Input validation prevents improperly formed data from entering the system. Thus, trying to prevent injections, it’s crucial to validate all the input.

Prepared statements with parameterized queries. It is an effective way to forestall SQL injections. Some of the parameters are not specified when creating a statement but added during the execution process.

Limited user rights. There is no need to connect to the database always using accounts with admin privileges. To reduce the chances of injection, database users should have the most essential rights. For example, it’s better to provide them with access only to a particular database without the possibility to create or alter information in the tables.

Enhanced data protection. It’s crucial to encrypt both stored and transmitted data by using modern encryption techniques. In BizTalk360, both client and server-side encryption are handled. All the sensitive data like passwords and keys are all encrypted and stored in the database. Also, it would not be displayed as plain text in the UI.

Security protocols. All the incoming information should come through advanced security protocols such as HTTPS, SSL, and TLS.

Improved access control. Access control should operate on the server-side applying Access Control Lists (ACL) and role-based authentication.

Deny access to functionality by default. Users should not be able to execute any actions with functionalities, fields, pages, etc. that they should not have access to.

Conclusion

These are some of the measures that are taken in BizTalk360 to mitigate the vulnerabilities. In the upcoming version of BizTalk360 v10.2, more security has been added based on the customer feedback. Why not give BizTalk360 a try for securely monitoring and managing your BizTalk environment effectively? Happy monitoring with BizTalk360!!!