Invicti DAST (formerly Netsparker DAST) vs Escape DAST

Invicti DAST (formerly Netsparker DAST) has established itself as a well-known security solution, primarily known for its capabilities in web application vulnerability scanning. They focused on helping organizations uncover common vulnerabilities like SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and other web application flaws. However, while Invicti seems to be a good option for identifying vulnerabilities, they've been focusing heavily on scanning rather than comprehensive discovery, meaning its capabilities in asset and API discovery are somewhat limited. Also, while the Invicti tool identifies numerous issues, its findings are often not as actionable, leaving security teams with vulnerabilities that require considerable manual intervention to address effectively.

How can Escape create a better DAST & API security solution than Invicti DAST? We’ll let you decide if we’re better by comparing the value provided by the tool. In this article, we’ll explain why and what makes us different from Invicti.

Below, you’ll find an in-depth comparison between Escape and Invicti across the entire security workflow - from building application inventory to scanning to remediation. We focused on key differences between those two tools. If you want to get a quick recap, jump to the last section.

We've built this comparison based on the following sources:

• Invicti's official website & product datasheets
• Invicti's documentation
• Invicti's publicly accessible demos on YouTube
• Feedback from security professionals

Recap: Invicti vs Escape DAST

You can find side by side comparison below:

Invicti

Pros:

• Supports various types of applications, including REST, SOAP, and GraphQL (to an extent) APIs, as well as traditional web applications.
• Part of the overall vulnerability scanning platform with IAST and SCA
• Supports various authentication options like OAuth 2.0, TOTP recording of a login sequence, and an automated mechanism that detects and handles standard login forms
• Includes custom security checks templates that help to customize security testing, but might require a lot of maintenance

Cons:

• Former users mentioned difficulties with CI/CD integration
• Relies on existing API documentation, which limits the ability to discover undocumented or shadow APIs
• Limited number of security tests for business logic testing of modern application types and GraphQL, focused primarily on common vulnerabilities
• Doesn't have the ability to pinpoint code/application owners
• Does not provide dynamic feedback to adapt coverage automatically, relying more on manual review and configuration for improvements

Escape DAST

Pros:

• Exceptional ability to discover even Shadow APIs in minutes by scanning exposed source code, reducing the time to value and risk of overlooked vulnerabilities
• Automated schema generation that helps you to launch scans right away and reduces the need for maintenance
• In-depth GraphQL testing capabilities and lowest false-positive rate
• Ability to prioritize the most critical API by business context, data sensitivity, and exposure.
• Actionable remediation code snippets for developers that help you build better relationships with them

Cons:

• Advanced feature sets like Custom Security Tests that may require specialized knowledge
• Number of integrations with some of the operational tools

Asset & API Discovery

You can't secure what you can't see, so the faster you get to see what are the applications are exposed on the internet, the more you reduce the risk of security breaches. And it all starts at the code level.

Escape is built to help you get the value out of it in the shortest time possible. It allows you to discover your web applications & APIs within a matter of minutes. Escape uses a sophisticated combination of subdomain enumeration, AI-powered fingerprinting, and OSINT techniques to identify and inventory APIs. This ensures that all web applications and APIs, including those not actively in use, are discovered and documented.

You can go further by integrating with code repositories (in Github, Gitlab..), or tools like Wiz to pinpoint exactly what assets exist all across your application landscape and who owns what.

According to their website, Invicti finds domains and applications through email matching, reverse API lookup, organization name matching, or AWS integration and APIs through zero-config testing, API management system integrations, and network API discovery.

These three methods can be combined to identify and fetch API endpoints:

• Network API Discovery: The Invicti Network Traffic Analyzer observes the traffic on your network to identify and then reconstruct REST API calls into OpenAPI3 specifications.
• API Management Integration: Invicti Enterprise integrates with API management systems to fetch and sync your known Swagger2 and OpenAPI3 specifications.
• Zero Configuration API Discovery: Scans your existing cloud targets for open ports and accessible paths to identify and retrieve Swagger2 and OpenAPI3 specifications.

This means Invicti is more dependent on existing documentation and visible endpoints, and it can struggle with discovering undocumented or shadow APIs, which are common in rapidly changing development environments. Essentially, Invicti can only detect APIs that are already somehow integrated into your system or already targeted, making its discovery approach more reactive than proactive.

Additionally, the amount of information displayed within the Invicti API Inventory doesn't appear to be very comprehensive:

Deploying Invicti for API discovery isn't also as straightforward. According to their documentation, setting up API discovery with Invicti involves multiple configuration steps, including linking it to existing network monitoring, or connecting it to specific cloud environments.

For example, when it comes to network monitoring, it is achieved by deploying the Invicti Network Traffic Analyzer (NTA) to your Kubernetes cluster. "The NTA includes a tap plugin that identifies API-specific unencrypted web traffic, which are converted to telemetry messages and sent to the NTA for reconstruction into OpenAPI3 specs. Those reconstructed OpenAPI3 specs are then pushed to your API Inventory in Invicti Enterprise."

With Escape, to get started all you need is to put in your main domain name, so you can build inventory without any intervention from the development team, which is not necessarily the case when you need to deploy traffic-based API discovery tool. Simplified deployment processes minimize the need for specialized knowledge and extensive internal resources.

Once you've discovered all your exposed applications, you can enrich the data discovered and classified in front-end and API inventory by connecting with your developer tools like Postman, GitHub, and GitLab, cloud platforms like AWS and Azure and gateways like Apigee, Axway, Kong Gateway and Kong Connect and Mulesoft. To scan internal applications behind your organization's firewall or VPN, you can connect Escape's repeater proxy.

Despite making it easy to discover all applications, Escape doesn't fall short in the depth of the information it uncovers. You can see it for yourself 👇

Security Testing

Once discovery is done, it comes down to security testing.

Invicti is strong when it comes to testing front-end apps and APIs, providing a good range of security checks for well-documented REST (and potentially SOAP or gRPC APIs, but it's hard to judge), such as injection flaws, authentication issues, and misconfigurations. However, its capabilities depend heavily on the presence of an accurate OpenAPI or Swagger file and a predefined schema. It lacks some flexibility when dealing with undocumented endpoints.

In contrast, Escape uses a proprietary machine learning algorithm to automatically reconstruct API schemas, enabling context-aware scanning that can be initiated right away.

Escape’s testing is more thorough, happens before a web app or an API is released into production, and provides clear, actionable insights without the noise of false positives.

Escape relies on its proprietary feedback-driven Business Logic Security Testing algorithm. It excels in detecting even complex business-logic vulnerabilities, especially in modern API types like GraphQL. Escape's algortihm addresses this complexity by autonomously generating legitimate traffic to test API's business logic.

Through techniques like Sourcing Inference and Strong Typing Inference, Escape ensures the accuracy of generated requests, while integration with generative AI enhances adaptability, particularly in complex attack scenarios.

GraphQL security

GraphQL, a query language for APIs, has gained significant traction in recent years due to its flexibility and efficiency.

Escape DAST has exceptional support for GraphQL Security Testing, integrating more than 100 GraphQL-specific tests,  like aliasing and batching attacks, and even the most complicated access control issues.

Contrary to other scanners, Escape handles GraphQL natively and not as another HTTP API. Even better, our engine is capable of suggesting code fixes for all findings and all GraphQL engines to maximize developer productivity when fixing issues.

Escape r-elies on a powerful feedback-driven graph exploration algorithm that can explore and understand the business logic of your GraphQL API.

“Escape is an innovative tool, and its results and algorithms are truly impressive. It was able to find GraphQL vulnerabilities that their competitors haven't seen. It also provides me with extensive testing capabilities." - Pierre Charbel, Product Security Engineer, Lightspeed

On the other hand, according to their website, Invicti scans GraphQL for the following vulnerabilities:

The number of checks available for GraphQL in Invicti is also constrained to the most common vulnerabilities like injections, which means its depth of testing does not cover all edge cases or advanced GraphQL-specific threats.

Coverage

Comprehensive coverage of DAST scanners is crucial because it ensures that all pages of a web app, endpoints of an API and data flows are thoroughly tested, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities being overlooked, which could lead to potential breaches.

Escape focuses on providing thorough and accurate coverage by leveraging its proprietary feedback-driven algorithms.

This approach ensures that all potential attack surfaces are explored comprehensively, particularly in complex API types like GraphQL. Escape’s logging and coverage mechanisms are designed to adapt dynamically, capturing detailed insights that are relevant and actionable for security teams.

The platform also prioritizes reducing noise, ensuring that logs are concise and directly tied to meaningful vulnerabilities. This results in a more efficient scanning process that minimizes unnecessary data, making it easier for teams to focus on critical issues.

Going beyond, Escape provides step-by-step recommendations to configure scans properly and benefit from Escape’s full testing engine capabilities. You can find more information about Escape's coverage in the docs.

In comparison, Invicti provides coverage with a strong emphasis on detecting known vulnerabilities but relies on existing schemas and manual adjustments to optimize scan coverage. According to Invicti's documentation, there can be gaps in scan coverage, especially if critical configurations are missed or APIs are not well-documented. Invicti offers guidelines to address these gaps, but the effectiveness of its coverage is highly dependent on the accuracy and thoroughness of the provided API documentation and the correct use of scanning parameters.

To check a scan’s coverage, you can examine the Crawled URLs Report or the Sitemap (these guidelines are general for all Invicti web scans). While these tools—Crawled URLs Report and Sitemap—are helpful for understanding what parts of the system were covered, they require manual review to effectively address gaps in coverage. This manual analysis can be time-consuming and may leave room for human error. The need to examine detailed reports and visualize structures introduces complexity, especially in larger environments with numerous endpoints and interactions.

In contrast, Escape's approach to coverage and logging is more automated and adaptive, focusing on minimizing noise while ensuring comprehensive scanning of all relevant endpoints.

Risk-scoring

Invicti relies on Invicti’s Predictive Risk Scoring to calculate risk scores using a dedicated in-house machine learning model. The Invicti risk score indicates how likely a website is to have vulnerabilities that make it susceptible to attacks before the scan, it's not linked to the fact how exploitable each vulnerability is or whether asset is exposed. Invicti also mentioned that Predictive Risk Scoring is also not as thorough as scanning each site, so it is important to note that you need to scan your sites to find vulnerabilities.

Without a clear system for ranking vulnerabilities based on their business impact (i.e. actual vulnerability criticality, its exposure and exploitability), organizations may find it challenging to determine which vulnerabilities to address first, leading to inefficient use of resources and potential oversight of critical issues.

Escape, however, offers a distinct advantage with its vulnerability prioritization funnel. This feature automatically identifies and prioritizes business-critical vulnerabilities (exposed and exploitable), ensuring that the most significant threats are addressed promptly. In addition, it clear shows each application's code owner.

Since August 2024, Escape has been moving away from the traditional CVSS score-based system and adopting a new approach that highlights Escape Severity, including context related to API services. While CVSS scores provide a numerical risk measure, they don’t always capture the full picture. Escape Severity considers various factors such as the type of vulnerability, its exploitability, CVSS score, and other risk factors.

This comprehensive approach helps us better align issue prioritization with real-world risks and ensures you tackle the most critical issues more effectively.

By streamlining the prioritization process, Escape enables security teams to focus their efforts where they matter most, enhancing overall security and providing peace of mind that critical vulnerabilities are being effectively managed.

Remediation

One of Invicti's key drawbacks is that its findings aren’t easily actionable. 

Detecting vulnerabilities is only the first step; providing developers with actionable remediation guidance is equally important.
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While Invicti can undoubtedly detect issues, its platform provides little direct support for developers to fix the identified vulnerabilities. The absence of code snippets or step-by-step remediation instructions means that security engineers need to manually translate alerts into fixes, which can be slow and error-prone.

Escape goes above and beyond by offering tailored remediations and code snippets to address identified vulnerabilities efficiently.

For each vulnerability, security teams can automatically share these code snippets with pre-filled remediation steps in Jira, saving time and ensuring faster resolution. Your developers can hit the ground running with the fix already in hand.

Conclusion

While Invicti offers a solid DAST application security scanning, it falls short in several key areas such as comprehensive API discovery, detailed testing capabilities, tailored specifically to APIs, especially for GraphQL, and actionable remediation.

Escape provides a more holistic and automated approach to API discovery and security. Its focus is on agentless API discovery, automated schema generation, advanced security testing, and actionable insights for developers.

If you still have doubts, take a moment with our team and see directly during a demo what APIs your organization left exposed.Escape provides a more holistic and automated approach to API discovery and security. Its focus is on agentless API discovery, automated schema generation, advanced API security testing, and actionable insights for developers.

If you still have doubts, take a moment with our team and see directly during a demo what APIs your organization left exposed.

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