Agile Security Testing

Universal Credit is a flagship service for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and given its accessibility on the Internet, the service is subject to a range of evolving threats. With agile methodologies, and the use of commodity cloud services, the need to rapidly iterate deployed applications and infrastructures is paramount in order to meet the needs of users. In such a fast-paced environment, it is therefore increasingly crucial that there is a comprehensive application testing regime in place, aligned with the development lifecycle, to ensure that vulnerabilities are identified and prioritised accordingly for remediation. The Universal Credit Programme requires a culture of continuous vulnerability assessment to align with the existing continuous integration (CI) pipeline. The DWP therefore require an Agile Security Testing service to complement our developers, DevOps and the Secure Design team to continuously test existing and new features as they iterate to feed into the Development lifecycle. The supplier will be required to undertake a combination of automated and manual testing to identify vulnerabilities within the application. In addition, the supplier is also required to utilise and optimise existing toolsets used for the identification of application vulnerabilities and suggest areas for improvement.