Security Testing & Code Analysis Flashcards

Which technique involves providing malformed or unexpected input to an application to discover security vulnerabilities?

Answer: Fuzzing

Fuzzing (fuzz testing) automatically supplies invalid, unexpected, or random data as input to a program to find crashes or security bugs.

In SDL, what is the primary goal of attack surface analysis?

Answer: Identify and reduce the number of exploitable entry points

Attack surface analysis identifies all possible entry points an attacker could use, enabling teams to minimize and harden those areas.

A security engineer finds that a web application concatenates user input directly into SQL queries. Which SAST finding category best describes this?

Answer: SQL injection sink

SAST tools classify direct concatenation of untrusted input into SQL statements as an SQL injection sink, indicating a data-flow vulnerability.

Which SDL activity specifically validates that security controls implemented during development are functioning correctly in a running environment?

Answer: Dynamic analysis (DAST)

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) exercises a running application to verify that runtime security controls behave as expected.

What does 'taint analysis' track in static code analysis tools?

Answer: Flow of untrusted data from sources to sensitive sinks

Taint analysis follows untrusted (tainted) data from user-controlled inputs through the code to security-sensitive operations (sinks) to detect injection flaws.

During a code review, a reviewer notices a function that reads beyond the bounds of a fixed-size stack buffer. Which vulnerability class is this?

Answer: Stack-based buffer overflow

Reading or writing past the end of a fixed-size stack-allocated buffer is a classic stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability.

Which SDL security testing phase is most appropriate for verifying that all items on the security 'bug bar' have been resolved before release?

Answer: Final security review (FSR)

The Final Security Review (FSR) is the SDL gate where teams confirm all bug bar issues are fixed or mitigated before shipping.