• Recommendations
• Application deployment options
  • Review apps
  • Docker Services

Requirements

• A web API using one of the supported API types:
  • REST API
  • SOAP
  • GraphQL
  • Form bodies, JSON, or XML
• An API specification in one of the following formats:
  • OpenAPI v2 or v3 Specification
  • GraphQL Schema
  • HTTP Archive (HAR)
  • Postman Collection v2.0 or v2.1

  Each scan supports exactly one specification. To scan more than one specification, use multiple scans.

• GitLab Runner available, with the docker executor on Linux/amd64.
• Target application deployed. For more details, read Deployment options.

• dast stage added to the CI/CD pipeline definition. This should be added after the deploy step, for example:

  stages:
    - build
    - test
    - deploy
    - dast
  

Recommendations

• Configure runners to use the always pull policy to run the latest versions of the analyzers.

• By default, API security testing downloads all artifacts defined by previous jobs in the pipeline. If your DAST job does not rely on environment_url.txt to define the URL under test or any other files created in previous jobs, you should not download artifacts. To avoid downloading artifacts, extend the analyzer CI/CD job to specify no dependencies. For example, for the API security testing analyzer, add the following to your .gitlab-ci.yml file:

  api_security:
    dependencies: []
  

Application deployment options

API security testing requires a deployed application to be available to scan.

Depending on the complexity of the target application, there are a few options as to how to deploy and configure the API security testing template.

Review apps

Review apps are the most involved method of deploying your DAST target application. To assist in the process, we created a Review App deployment using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This example can be found in our Review apps - GKE project, along with detailed instructions in the README.md on how to configure review apps for DAST.

Docker Services

If your application uses Docker containers you have another option for deploying and scanning with DAST. After your Docker build job completes and your image is added to your container registry, you can use the image as a service.

By using service definitions in your .gitlab-ci.yml, you can scan services with the DAST analyzer.

When adding a services section to the job, the alias is used to define the hostname that can be used to access the service. In the following example, the alias: yourapp portion of the dast job definition means that the URL to the deployed application uses yourapp as the hostname (https://yourapp/).

stages:
  - build
  - dast

include:
  - template: API-Security.gitlab-ci.yml

# Deploys the container to the GitLab container registry
deploy:
  services:
  - name: docker:dind
    alias: dind
  image: docker:20.10.16
  stage: build
  script:
    - docker login -u gitlab-ci-token -p $CI_JOB_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY
    - docker pull $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest || true
    - docker build --tag $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA --tag $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest .
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:latest

api_security:
  services: # use services to link your app container to the dast job
    - name: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
      alias: yourapp

variables:
  APISEC_TARGET_URL: https://yourapp

Most applications depend on multiple services such as databases or caching services. By default, services defined in the services fields cannot communicate with each another. To allow communication between services, enable the FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD feature flag.

variables:
  FF_NETWORK_PER_BUILD: "true" # enable network per build so all services can communicate on the same network

services: # use services to link the container to the dast job
  - name: mongo:latest
    alias: mongo
  - name: $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$CI_COMMIT_SHA
    alias: yourapp