Black-Box Penetration Testing:
Advantages, Disadvantages,
Techniques, and Tools
Today we live in a world with so much advancement in technologies
in every sector we can think of. Newer and newer technologies,
innovations are coming out almost every day making the life of
human simpler and easier. Taking the most common example, a
mobile phone, a person has access to almost every essential
services in the tip of his/her hand, be it navigations, food delivery,
banking, social media and endless other things. Every Business now
pretty much requires a website, even if they are not an IT company.
As businesses increase their dependence on IT, cloud services,
social media etc. their cyber security risk also increases at an
alarming rate.
Almost every day there is a new headline of a business getting
hacked, a ransomware attack, a zero day attack etc. The way to
combat is through penetration testing. Every company or a
business that have their own website or mobile application must
invest in cyber security services for their product to avoid being
victim of cybercrime.
Penetration testing can be categorized into three types: Black box,
Greybox and Whitebox. Every testing have their own benefits and
requirements, in testing such as greybox and whitebox the security
tester is given partial or complete information about the product to
be tested. Although both grey box and white box testing can help
strengthen the product from inside, the organisations should also
focus on the real case scenarios of how an adversary (hacker) can
compromise the organization with no inside information about the
product. This information can be the source code, the language in
which the source code is written, firewall being used, any cloud
services etc.
What is Black Box
Penetration Testing?
Black box penetration testing can be referred to as finding and
exploiting vulnerabilities in a system as an outsider. The security
tester is provided no information about the target except for an URL
in the case of web application testing or APK/IOS file in case of a
mobile application. Black box penetration testing can be considered
part of Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) since it can
only be performed on run-time application.
Small organisations such as start-ups usually do not have much
budget for penetration test can opt for black box test which is
cost-effective. The organisations can have their external assets
such as:
1:- Firewall
2:- Web application
3:- SaaS apps
4:- Routers
5:- Web Servers
6:- Application Servers
7:- Network
Tested for vulnerabilities. While black box is not an alternative to
complete security test, it does help in testing the assets from a
hacker’s point of view. Serious vulnerabilities like input
validations, information disclosure from error messages, server
misconfigurations etc. can be found from black box penetration
testing.
Advantages of Black Box
Here are some of the advantages of black box penetration testing:
1:- It finds exposed vulnerabilities in the network or the
application. For ex: Unnecessary open ports, application exposing
server or framework version which is vulnerable etc.
2:- It is capable of detecting issues such as input/output validation
errors, information disclosure in error messages, and so on.
3:- It is cheaper to conduct than other types of penetration testing
like grey box and white box.
4:- Detects incorrect product builds (e.g. old or missing
modules/files)
5:- Since it is DAST type, the pentest can be used to detect
implementation and configuration issues.
The penetration test is basically like how a hacker would try to
compromise the target.
Disadvantages of Black
Box
There are drawbacks of black box penetration test such as
1:- The testing conducted on the target is not thorough. The
penetration testing does not include source code analysis, and also
the tester is not provided any information about the target.
2:- The completion time for the whole penetration test is
unpredictable. It depends on how big the scope gets during the
reconnaissance phase, also the experience of the tester counts.
3:- The whole penetration test is based on guess work and trial &
error.
Tools and Techniques
There are many tools that can be used for a black box penetration
test, they include:
1. Nikto
2. OSINT
3. Any popular vulnerability Scanner
4. OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy)
Some of the most common Black box penetration testing
techniques are:
Fuzzing: Fuzzing can be used to test web interfaces for missing
input checks. It can be done injecting random or custom crafted
payload/data intended to cause error in the business logic in order
to output any kind of information disclosure.
Syntax Testing: This is accomplished by including input that
contains garbage, misplaced or missing elements, illegal
delimiters, and so on.The goal is to determine the outcomes if the
inputs deviate from the syntax.
Exploratory testing:It is testing without the use of a test strategy or
the expectation of a specific result.The objective is to use the results
or anomalies of one test to inform the results of another.It’s
especially useful in black-box penetration testing, when a
significant discovery might change the course of the entire test.
Data Analysis:It is basically reviewing of the data generated by the
target application. It can be helpful to understand the target
application’s internal workings.
Monitoring the program or a particular function flow
behaviour:Altering the input and checking how the target
application responds, this can include time delay, error messages,
any particular parameter or header requirements etc.
Test Scaffolding: This is basically automating the task with tools.
Some testing such as fuzzing are impossible to perform manually
because of the number of test cases that have to be checked, so
automation is preferred in this case.
Blog Source:https://detoxtechnologies.com/black-box-penetration-testing/
Black Box Penetration Testing | Black Box Pentest | Black Box
Testing Advantages | Black Box Security Testing | Blackbox Pentest