Quick guide to authenticated web-app scanning

Everything you need to know about running an authenticated scan

Naomi Purvis avatar
Written by Naomi Purvis
Updated over a week ago

⚠️ If you're thinking of an admin user when adding authentications, please read this article first: Adding an admin user when adding Authentications

⚠️ If you have an unauthenticated web-app, to benefit from our web-app scanner, you'll need to add placeholder authentication.

For more information, please see these articles:
What is authenticated web-app scanning?



Throughout this example we will be using 178.79.154.6 where we are hosting our test application, you may use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or IP address.

Adding a target

Head to the targets page and click + Add Targets as you would with any other target:

Once you've added your target and optionally added a tag, you will see it appear in your targets list:

If you click on the target name you will be taken to the Target Details page, where you can view more information about the target. If you click the 'Authentications' tab, you'll see a button inviting you to 'Add authentication'. Give it a click.

Adding authentications

Once you've clicked the '+ Add authentication" button the + Add button will allow you to add Authentications.

Once you click on + Add you will be presented with the following modal which will allow you to chose which authentication type you would like to add:

Add authentication

To keep this user guide concise, we have created separate help guides for each of the authentication types, which you can access by clicking the hyperlinks below:


Starting a scan

Once you've added all your authentications to your targets you can start a scan as you normally would.

Go to the Scans page, and click Scan Now. Select the targets you would like to scan, name the scan, and if you're only interested in your web ports (port 80 and 443 over TCP) click the Default Web Ports Only toggle (as shown below).

Scan Now

Please note, that when you start a scan all authentications will be tested – there is no way to specify which authentications you want to include in the scan, currently – this will mean if you have 4 authentications assigned to the target all 4 authenticated scans will be started against the target.

Once you're happy click the Start Scan button. You'll see that the scan has started and will be listed under the In Progress section of the Scans page.

Start scan

If you click on the View Progress button you'll see how complete (approximately) your scan is. Please note, this approximation will become more accurate the more scans you run.

If you ever see "Analyzing Results", don't worry, it just means that our team are manually something to make sure they're accurate.

Oh and last point, authenticated web-app scans can take significantly longer to run that normal, infrastructure scans – so don't panic if it's been a few hours.

User-uploaded Image


Reviewing results

Once the scan has finished and the results have been published, you'll be able to see all of the findings on your Issues page. Here you'll have the option to filter by tag / targets / severity / internal or external. You also have the ability to sort by severity or number or occurrences:

Clicking on an issue will allow you to see all occurrences, as well as the Description and Remediation advice. You also have the facility to snooze an issue or occurence, send to a dev tool of your choice (if you have the appropriate integration set up), as well as review the raw scanner output (which is helpful for those looking for some extra detail).


Downloading a report

We have just the article for that.


Please note, Authenticated web-app scanning is only available to those with Application licenses. If you'd like to learn more about this, head to the chat bot and ask to speak with a member of the team.

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