owasp-zap

name	owasp-zap
description	running or interpreting an…

OWASP ZAP Baseline Scanning

OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) performs DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) by scanning a running application for common security vulnerabilities from the OWASP Top 10.

When to Use

• After making changes to HTTP headers, authentication, or security middleware
• Before deploying to staging or production
• When reviewing security scan results from CI
• When triaging ZAP findings from pull request checks

Running Locally

# Requires Docker to be installed and running
bash scripts/zap-baseline.sh

The scan builds the Expo web export, serves it locally, and runs ZAP against it. Reports are saved to zap-report.html, zap-report.json, and zap-report.md.

Interpreting Results

ZAP findings are categorized by risk level:

Risk	Action
High	Fix immediately — indicates exploitable vulnerability
Medium	Fix before deployment — security best practice violation
Low	Fix when convenient — minor security improvement
Informational	Review — may be false positive or acceptable risk

Common Findings and Fixes

Infrastructure-Level (fix at CDN/hosting, not in code)

• CSP Header Not Set: Configure Content-Security-Policy at CDN or hosting platform. Expo web exports need script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' for hydration.
• HSTS Not Set: Configure Strict-Transport-Security at CDN/load balancer.
• X-Frame-Options: Use frame-ancestors in CSP at CDN level.

Application-Level (fix in code)

• Cookie flags missing: Ensure all cookies set HttpOnly, Secure, and SameSite attributes.
• Debug error messages: Ensure error boundaries don't leak stack traces in production.
• Server version disclosure: Remove or mask the Server response header.

Configuration

ZAP scan rules are configured in .zap/baseline.conf. Each line controls how ZAP treats a specific rule:

• IGNORE: Skip the rule entirely
• WARN: Report finding but don't fail the build
• FAIL: Fail the build if this finding is detected

CI Integration

ZAP runs automatically in CI via the zap-baseline.yml workflow. Results are uploaded as artifacts and the build fails on medium+ severity findings.