Free for Open Source Application Security Tools

Author: Dave Wichers
Contributor(s): Sherif Koussa, Dirk Wetter

Introduction

OWASP’s mission is to help the world improve the security of its software. One of the best ways OWASP can do that is to help Open Source developers improve the software they are producing that everyone else relies on. As such, the following lists of automated vulnerability detection tools that are free for open source projects have been gathered together here to raise awareness of their availability.

We would encourage open source projects to use the following types of tools to improve the security and quality of their code:

Disclaimer: OWASP does not endorse any of the Vendors or Scanning Tools by listing them below. They are simply listed if we believe they are free for use by open source projects. We have made every effort to provide this information as accurately as possible. If you are the vendor of a free for open source tool and think this information is incomplete or incorrect, please send an e-mail to dave.wichers (at) owasp.org and we will make every effort to correct this information.

Free for Open Source Tools

Tools that are free for open source projects in each of the above categories are listed below.

SAST Tools

OWASP already maintains a page of known SAST tools: Source Code Analysis Tools, which includes a list of those that are “Open Source or Free Tools Of This Type”. Any such tools could certainly be used. One such cloud service that looks promising is:

  • GitHub code scanning - A free for open source static analysis service that uses GitHub Actions and CodeQL to scan public repositories on GitHub. Supports C/C++, C#, Ruby (beta), Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and Go (see here for more information)
    • If you do not want to use GitHub Actions, you may use the CodeQL CLI; however, be sure to read the license terms in full.
    • By default, CodeQL only looks for high fidelity security related results (well known true positives), so your results may look different from LGTM.
    • To achieve the same or similar results provided by LGTM, try enabling the security-and-quality query suite within the CodeQL query pack.

In addition, we are aware of the following commercial SAST tools that are free for Open Source projects:

  • Coverity Scan Static Analysis - Can be lashed into Travis-CI so it’s done automatically with online resources. Supports over a dozen programming languages.
  • reshift - A CI/CD tool that uses static code analysis to scan for vulnerabilities and uses machine learning to give a prediction on false positives. Supports Java with future support for NodeJS and JavaScript planned. If you go to the Pricing section on this page, it says it is free for public repositories.
  • Xanitizer - A SAST tool for Java, Scala, and JavaScript/TypeScript. Per this pricing page, it is free for Open Source projects if you contact the vendor.
  • HCL AppScan CodeSweep - This is a SAST community edition version of HCL AppScan. Free for everyone to use. The tool currently supports Python, Ruby, JS (Vue, Node, Angular, JQuery, React, etc), PHP, Perl, Go, TypeScript & more, with new languages being added frequently.
    • CodeSweep - VS Code Plugin - Scans files upon saving them. The results show the location of a finding, type, and remediation advice.
    • CodeSweep - GitHub Action - Scan the new code on a push/pull request using a GitHub action. Findings are highlighted in the Files Changed view and details about the issue and mitigation steps can be found in the Actions page. Unrestricted usage allowed with a free trial account.

DAST Tools

If your project has a web application component, we recommend running automated scans against it to look for vulnerabilities. OWASP maintains a page of known DAST Tools, and the License column on this page indicates which of those tools have free capabilities. Our primary recommendation is to use one of these:

  • OWASP ZAP - A full featured free and open source DAST tool that includes both automated scanning for vulnerabilities and tools to assist expert manual web app pen testing.
  • StackHawk - StackHawk is a commercially supported DAST tool built on OWASP ZAP and optimized to run in CI/CD (almost every CI supported) to test web applications during development and in CI/CD. The StackHawk platform allows you to manage findings over time in different environements. StackHawk is free for OpenSource projects and free to use on a single application.
  • Arachni - Arachni is a commercially supported scanner, but its free for most use cases, including scanning open source projects.
  • VWT Digital’s sec-helpers - Collection of dynamic security related helpers. Sec-helpers is a bundle of useful tests and validators to ensure the security of a given domain.
  • OWASP purpleteam - A security regression testing SaaS and CLI, perfect for inserting into your build pipelines. You don’t need to write any tests yourself. purpleteam is smart enough to know how to test, you just need to provide a Job file which tells purpleteam what you want tested. It has two main environments local and cloud.
    • local is OWASP - set everything up yourself in your own environment.
    • cloud is a proprietary offering with everything hosted for you in the cloud. You just need to configure and run the CLI.

    purpleteam is pluggable, if it doesn’t have a tester that you need you can add your own. One of the testers (the web application tester) uses OWASP ZAP under the hood.

We are not aware of any other commercial grade tools that offer their full featured DAST product free for open source projects.

IAST Tools

IAST tools are typically geared to analyze Web Applications and Web APIs, but that is vendor specific. There may be IAST products that can perform good security analysis on non-web applications as well.

We are aware of only one IAST Tool that is free after registration at this time:

  • Contrast Community Edition (CE) - Fully featured version for 1 app and up to 5 users (some Enterprise features disabled). Contrast CE supports Java and .NET only.

Open Source Software (OSS) Security Tools

OSS refers to the open source libraries or components that application developers leverage to quickly develop new applications and add features to existing apps. Gartner refers to the analysis of the security of these components as software composition analysis (SCA). So OSS Analysis and SCA are the same thing.

OWASP recommends that all software projects generally try to keep the libraries they use as up-to-date as possible to reduce the likelihood of Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities (OWASP Top 10-2017 A9). There are two recommended approaches for this:

Keeping Your Libraries Updated

Using the latest version of each library is recommended because security issues are frequently fixed ‘silently’ by the component maintainer. By silently, we mean without publishing a CVE for the security fix.

  • Maven Versions plugin
    • For Maven projects, can be used to generate a report of all dependencies used and when upgrades are available for them. Either a direct report, or part of the overall project documentation using: mvn site.
  • Dependabot
    • A GitHub only service that creates pull requests to keep your dependencies up-to-date. It automatically generates a pull request for each dependency you can upgrade, which you can then ignore, or accept, as you like. It supports tons of languages.
    • Recommended for all open source projects maintained on GitHub!

Detecting Known Vulnerable Components

As an alternative, or in addition to, trying to keep all your components up-to-date, a project can specifically monitor whether any of the components they use have known vulnerable components.

Free tools of this type:

Commercial tools of this type that are free for open source:

Code Quality tools

Quality has a significant correlation to security. As such, we recommend open source projects also consider using good code quality tools. A few that we are aware of are:

  • SpotBugs - Open source code quality tool for Java
    • This is the active fork for FindBugs, so if you use Findbugs, you should switch to this.
    • SpotBugs users should add the FindSecBugs plugin (http://find-sec-bugs.github.io/) to their SpotBugs setup, as it significantly improves on the very basic security checking native to SpotBugs.
  • SonarQube
    • This is a commercially supported, very popular, free (and commercial) code quality tool. It includes most if not all the FindSecBugs security rules plus lots more for quality, including a free, internet online CI setup to run it against your open source projects. SonarQube supports numerous languages: https://www.sonarqube.org/features/multi-languages/
  • DeepScan - Supports JavaScript, TypeScript
    • DeepScan is a static code analysis tool and hosted service for inspecting JavaScript code. It checks possible run-time errors and poor code quality using data-flow analysis and provides results for the project’s code quality.
    • DeepScan is free for open source projects on GitHub.

Security Tools Built into DevOps/CI Environments

Please let us know if you are aware of any other high quality application security tools that are free for open source (or simply add them to this page). We are particularly interested in identifying and listing commercial tools that are free for open source, as they tend to be better and easier to use than open source (free) tools. If you are aware of any missing from this list, please add them, or let us know (dave.wichers (at) owasp.org) and we’ll confirm they are free, and add them for you. Please encourage your favorite commercial tool vendor to make their tool free for open source projects as well!!

Finally, please forward this page to the open source projects you rely on and encourage them to use these free tools!

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