Home
Configuration
You configure a scan by choosing settings that best describe your application, and the kind of testing you want.
Views
API
For scanning web APIs, define your API type, explore methods, and specify domains to be tested.
Scan using an OpenAPI specification file
You can use an OpenAPI specification file to automatically scan your OpenAPI, which provides better coverage by allowing you to update parameters and include all endpoints. This ensures a more thorough and accurate scan, helping to identify potential issues across the entire API.

Welcome
Welcome to the documentation for HCL AppScan Standard version 10.7.0
Getting started
This section provides a short tour of basic product features and procedures, including using the wizard to set up a scan.
Configuration
You configure a scan by choosing settings that best describe your application, and the kind of testing you want.
- Presets
  Presets give you the main configuration views needed for a particular type of scan.
- Views
  - Starting URL and domains
    Configure the Starting URL for the scan, and any additional servers and domains to be included.
  - API
    For scanning web APIs, define your API type, explore methods, and specify domains to be tested.
    - Scan using an OpenAPI specification file
      You can use an OpenAPI specification file to automatically scan your OpenAPI, which provides better coverage by allowing you to update parameters and include all endpoints. This ensures a more thorough and accurate scan, helping to identify potential issues across the entire API.
    - Scan using a Postman Collection
      If you have a Postman Collection of requests to your web API, you can import it and use it as the basis for a scan.
  - Excluded paths and files
    You can configure AppScan to ignore certain paths in the application, or specific types of file.
  - Multi-step operations
    Record and manage multi-step operations that are required to reach specific parts of the application that could otherwise be missed.
  - Login management
    Show AppScan® how to log in to your application.
  - API key
    AppScan Standard supports API authentication for scanning APIs that require an API key.
  - Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
    Configure AppScan® to use one-time password or security questions (multi-factor authentication) when logging in.
  - HTTP authentication
    Add server-level authentication and client-side certificates, if required by the application.
  - AWS authorization
    Configure AWS settings.
  - Communication and proxy
    Configure communication timeout and proxy server settings.
  - Parameters, cookies & headers
    Identify session IDs and list parameters to exclude from the scan.
  - Automatic form fill
    Provide AppScan® with valid parameter values for filling forms in your application during the scan.
  - Error pages
    Enhance your application's error page identification by adding strings or regular expressions that enable AppScan® to recognize your error pages witihin the response content, path or both. This ensures that AppScan can effectively recognize and handle your error pages, contributing to the overall accuracy of your security scans.
  - Explore options
    Define the explore method (action-based, request-based, or both) that AppScan will use to explore the application, as well as other basic and advanced explore settings.
  - Test policy and optimization
    Define the collection of tests that will be sent to the application during testing (the test policy), and apply optimization for faster scans at times in the product lifecycle when speed is more important to you than scan depth.
  - Environment definition
    Environment definition is not essential, but enables AppScan® to safely refrain from sending non-relevant tests during the scan, resulting in a faster and more accurate scan. Customizing CVSS 3.1 environmental scores will improve the accuracy of your scan results.
  - Test options
    Additional test options.
  - Privilege escalation
    Compare scans that used different user privileges, to discover if privileged resources are accessible to non-privileged users.
  - Content-based view
    Lets you define a logical structure for the application tree, for cases where a URL-based tree will just be a long list under one or two URLs. This is not essential, but can make it much easier to navigate results.
  - Advanced configuration
    This view provides access to numerous advanced registry settings and should only be used by experienced AppScan users or when instructed to do so by the support team to troubleshoot a problem.
- Scan file structure
  Explains the basic structure of an AppScan Standard SCAN file.
- Scan templates
  A scan template is simply a scan configuration that has been saved so that you can use it again.
- Changing the configuration during a scan
Manual exploring
Manual exploring enables you to explore specific parts of your application, filling in fields and forms as you go. This can be a way of ensuring that particular areas of the site are covered, and that AppScan has the information needed to complete forms correctly.
Scanning
Learn how to start a scan, and what happens during the scan; how to manually manipulate the Explore stage, and how to export the results of a scan.
Data
Data view is populated with information about the structure of the site during the Explore stage of the scan.
Issues
Issues view provides access to the results of a scan. You can view results at a high level or select specific tests or objects and access more details. These details include how to fix, requests/responses, and differences between the test variants that resulted in issues. You can manipulate the severity of issues, resend tests (with or without modifications), and create reports based on Issues.
Reports
Tools
This section explains how to use additional tools provided with HCL AppScan Standard.
Integrations
This section describes integrations of other applications with AppScan Standard:
Best practices
This section contains some best practices and use cases for advanced users.
FAQ & Troubleshooting
CLI
This section describes the syntax and options available using the Command line interface.
References
Menus and toolbar summaries, and glossary

Scan using an OpenAPI specification file

You can use an OpenAPI specification file to automatically scan your OpenAPI, which provides better coverage by allowing you to update parameters and include all endpoints. This ensures a more thorough and accurate scan, helping to identify potential issues across the entire API.

Procedure

Go to Configuration > API.
Select OpenAPI specification file and click Add specification file.
Enter the URL or click Browse to choose the file from your local drive, then click Continue. AppScan accepts only JSON or YAML formats for the specification file.
AppScan parses the data and loads it into the table of Additional Parameters.
Configure the base URL if not automatically populated.
AppScan automatically detects parameters' values during explore, but you can manually update parameters for better performance in cases where the value cannot be detected automatically during scan. Edit the parameter values by matching them with their relevant URLs.
It is strongly recommended to update the parameters for better scan coverage, ensuring all endpoints are covered and avoiding request failures.
Configure API authentication if required. Based on your specification file, Configure API key and/or Configure basic authentication (HTTP) links are displayed to configure authentication. If the links are not displayed, you can manually configure the authentication through API key, HTTP Authentication, or Login Management (record login or use automatic login) that ensures better scan coverage covering most endpoints and avoiding request failures.
If AppScan does not use the parameter values you updated, you can:
- Select the Apply this value to all parameters checkbox in the Edit Parameter dialog.
To avoid exceeding rate limit failures during exploration, adjust the Max. request rate in the Communication and proxy tab.
Once configuration is complete, you can start a scan.
AppScan starts an automatic scan.
Note: If you add a local file instead of a URL to a configuration, you cannot export it as a SCANT (template) file, as the specification file cannot be included in a template. You must either remove the specification file or save as a SCAN file.

What to do next

Once the scan is complete, you can view the parameters found during the scan on the Automatic Form-Fill page, as well as the requests sent and parameters found on the Data page.