Zed Attack Proxy

The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an open-source web application security scanner and penetration testing tool developed by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). It is designed to help security professionals find vulnerabilities in web applications during development and testing phases. ZAP provides a wide range of features for both automated and manual security testing of web applications. Here's an overview of ZAP's features and capabilities:

• Proxy Functionality: ZAP acts as an intercepting proxy, allowing users to intercept and modify HTTP and HTTPS requests and responses between their browser and the target web application. This enables users to inspect and manipulate web traffic for security testing purposes.

• Spidering and Scanning: ZAP includes automated spidering and scanning functionality to discover and map the structure of web applications. The spidering feature recursively crawls through the application, identifying accessible pages and parameters, while the scanning feature automatically tests for common vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and more.

• Active and Passive Scanning: ZAP supports both active and passive scanning techniques. Active scanning involves actively sending attack payloads to the target application to identify vulnerabilities, while passive scanning involves analyzing responses and identifying potential vulnerabilities without modifying requests.

• Attack Proxy: ZAP includes a wide range of built-in attack payloads and techniques for testing various security vulnerabilities, including XSS, SQL injection, CSRF, directory traversal, and more. Users can customize and configure attack options to suit their testing requirements.

• Fuzzer: ZAP includes a built-in fuzzer tool for testing input validation and boundary conditions in web applications. The fuzzer generates a variety of test cases with different input values to identify potential security flaws.

• Authentication and Session Management: ZAP supports authentication and session management features, allowing users to test web applications that require login credentials or maintain user sessions. Users can configure authentication credentials and session tokens to access restricted areas of the application.

• Reporting: ZAP generates detailed reports of security vulnerabilities identified during testing, including severity ratings, descriptions, and recommendations for remediation. Reports can be exported in various formats, including HTML, XML, and JSON, for further analysis and sharing with stakeholders.

• Integration: ZAP can be integrated into continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipelines for automated security testing of web applications. It also supports integration with other tools and platforms through APIs and extensions.