Moving an application from an idea to a live production environment is a complex journey. Developers build, test, and deploy code at an incredible pace, thanks to modern CI/CD pipelines. But with speed comes risk. How can you be sure that the code flying through your pipeline is secure? This is where the journey from zero to a secure production environment begins, and a critical stop along the way is Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST).
Integrating security into your development lifecycle, often called DevSecOps, is no longer optional. It’s a fundamental practice for building resilient and trustworthy software. While many teams use Static Application Security Testing (SAST) to check code at rest, a running application can reveal a whole new set of vulnerabilities. This is precisely what a dast scan is designed to find. By simulating external attacks on your application while it’s running, DAST helps you uncover issues that are invisible in the source code alone.
Let’s walk through the journey of embedding DAST into your CI/CD pipeline, turning a manual security check into an automated, seamless part of your workflow.
The Starting Point: A Pipeline Without Eyes
Imagine your CI/CD pipeline as a high-speed assembly line. Code is committed, builds are triggered, unit tests pass, and the application is deployed to a staging environment. Everything looks good on the surface. However, without DAST, you have a major blind spot. You aren’t testing how your running application behaves under attack.
Vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, or insecure server configurations often only appear when the application is operational. Leaving this testing until after deployment is like letting a car roll off the assembly line without checking the brakes. The goal is to shift this critical check left, making it an integral part of the pre-production process.
Stage 1: Choosing Your DAST Tool and Environment
The first step in this transformation is selecting the right tool and preparing your testing ground. Not all DAST tools are created equal. Some are heavyweight solutions that take hours to run, while others are designed for the speed of CI/CD. For pipeline integration, you need a tool that is:
- Fast: It cannot become a bottleneck that developers are tempted to skip.
- Automated: It must be configurable to run via scripts or API calls without manual intervention.
- Accurate: The tool should provide clear, actionable results with a low rate of false positives to maintain developer trust.
Once you have a tool, you need a suitable environment to test against. A dedicated staging or testing environment that closely mirrors production is ideal. This ensures that the DAST scan is testing a realistic version of your application. Running scans against a live production environment is generally discouraged due to the potential for performance degradation or data corruption from the simulated attacks.
Stage 2: The Initial Integration – Crawl Before You Walk
Jumping straight into a fully automated, blocking DAST implementation can cause friction. A better approach is to start small. Begin by configuring your CI/CD pipeline to trigger a DAST scan after a successful deployment to your staging environment.
At this stage, configure the scan to run in a non-blocking “audit” mode. This means the pipeline will not fail even if vulnerabilities are found. The primary goal here is to gather data and build familiarity. Developers and security teams can review the scan reports, understand the types of issues being found, and start triaging them. This initial phase helps you fine-tune the DAST scanner’s configuration and establish a baseline for your application’s security posture. The OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), an open-source tool, is an excellent resource for teams just starting this journey.
Stage 3: Automation and Alerting – Walking with Confidence
With a baseline established, you can move toward more robust automation. The goal of this stage is to make the DAST results visible and actionable within the development workflow.
Integrate the DAST tool’s output with your existing systems. For example:
- Alerting: Send notifications to a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel when a scan completes or finds critical vulnerabilities.
- Ticketing: Automatically create tickets in Jira or a similar system for high-severity findings, assigning them to the appropriate team for remediation.
This step connects the dots between detection and action. It ensures that security findings don’t just sit in a forgotten report but land directly in front of the developers who can fix them. This feedback loop is essential for creating a culture of security ownership.
The Destination: Blocking Builds and Proactive Security
The final stage in your journey is moving from simply detecting issues to proactively preventing them from reaching production. In this “run” phase, you configure your DAST scan to act as a quality gate.
You can set rules in your CI/CD pipeline to fail the build if the scan discovers vulnerabilities that exceed a certain severity threshold. For example, you might decide that any “High” or “Critical” vulnerability should block the deployment. This is a powerful step that enforces your security policy automatically.
This approach ensures that only code meeting your security standards can proceed. It transforms DAST from a simple check into a true guardrail, giving you confidence that every deployment is not just functional but also secure. For more context on building secure systems, the principles outlined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) provide a solid framework for modern application security.
By methodically progressing from auditing to full-blown automated enforcement, you can seamlessly implement a DAST scan into your CI/CD pipeline. This journey transforms your development process, embedding security into its very core and ensuring you ship more resilient software without sacrificing speed.
