If you’re involved in securing the applications your organization develops, there’s no question that static application security testing (SAST) solutions are an important part of a comprehensive application security strategy. SAST protects your software, supports your business more securely, reduces costs, reduces risk, and accelerates the time to develop, deliver, and deploy mission-critical applications.
SAST scans code early in development, so the AppSec team doesn’t rush to fix unexpected vulnerabilities just before a big release is planned. Avoid surprises and launch delays by inadvertently releasing risky software to customers or into production.
But considering SAST as part of the larger AppSec platform, Move security everywhere The software development lifecycle (SDLC) makes it possible, but some SAST solutions outperform others.
Know what to focus on
With so many players in the market, sometimes making competing claims, it can be confusing what to look for when choosing a SAST solution. It’s important to understand what’s behind each claim and see if it matches reality.
In some cases, the solution your organization originally used may no longer be suitable as your organization grows, or as other teams begin using it.
So the real question is “Which SAST solution is best for my organization? ”
What to Look for in a SAST Solution
Fit for the AppSec program
A comprehensive application security platform simplifies the security of your application code, open source dependencies, supply chain, IaC, APIs, containers, and more – all with a single scan. The platform provides fast, correlated and accurate results to expedite repairs.
When looking for a SAST solution, if it’s part of a unified AppSec platform, it offers the most value for protecting modern applications. A complete platform should provide centralized management of SAST, SCA, SCS, API security, DAST, IaC security, and container security.
The platform should be able to grow as your needs change. When comparing platform-based approaches with AppSec, make sure that you can correlate scan results across different scanning engines, rather than trying to manually aggregate results from various standalone AST solutions, to help you scale your entire project or application. Allows you to obtain a holistic risk assessment across
flexibility is key
No two applications are the same, and different stakeholders such as CISOs, application security teams, and developers have unique needs.
Sometimes you need to get an overview of the risks in your application and do a “broad scan”, or you need to “deep scan” specific parts of your application or investigate very specific risks. in some cases.
The flexibility of deep and wide scanning covers all use cases. It provides flexibility so organizations can standardize on a single platform that covers all use cases.
Presets (also called rule sets) are groups of ready-to-use scan rules that can be applied to different scans. SAST solutions come pre-packaged with a variety of pre-packaged presets to support key use cases, such as getting a “big picture” overview of code risks and vulnerabilities and ensuring regulatory compliance. must be
In some cases, no prepackaged ruleset, no matter how extensive, is sufficient and an organization wants to edit or create a custom ruleset. This improves accuracy and minimizes false positives.
Accuracy is important in SAST
For a SAST solution to be useful, it has to be accurate.
When we talk about SAST, we often talk about “false positives,” items flagged as not being a true risk. To avoid these, use flexible presets and customized queries or rules.
But even more worrisome are “false negatives,” or risks in code that are overlooked and not identified by SAST scanners. With false negatives, you unwittingly open a vulnerability without even having a chance to investigate and fix it. You are flying blind
One way to reduce the chance of false negatives is to use an “application-centric” solution that understands how your application works. This solution can trace the flow of data through code and execute code with symbolic input, allowing you to explore all paths in your code to find exploitable paths. Relying on regex-based tools may sound convenient, but at the end of the day, they’re lightweight and fast. Not when a company is in the news because of the actual exposed vulnerable code.
Another solution is to use the appropriate profile for your codebase and create custom queries as needed. For example, if your organization has developed its own custom sanitizer, you can tailor your queries to tell SAST about this sanitizer to eliminate false positives. Using a customizable query language is key to reducing false positives without enabling false positives.
Find SAST solutions that work for developers
As mentioned above, fixing the source of the problem instead of just fixing the syntax error is quicker and saves money in the long run. A fast scan that misses vulnerabilities because it doesn’t understand how the code relates to the application is not the goal. But it doesn’t force developers who are already in a hurry to carefully consider each error.
it is important We will solve your problem immediately. The way to do it is “Best place to fix.” This allows developers to pinpoint the exact location to fix vulnerabilities, saving time and effort. And in many cases, that single fix can eliminate multiple vulnerabilities and reduce the number of code fixes needed by changing the code at the best fix.
Most developers aren’t security experts, but a good SAST solution can turn them into security heroes.
Show developers how to fix vulnerabilities, explain the implications and implications of vulnerabilities, and look for solutions that help them write more secure code in the future. Some solutions offer or integrate code training that teaches developers how to identify and create secure, high-quality code.
Easily gamified code security training makes it easy and fast to learn, increasing developer adoption, and this approach can also improve employee retention.
With a good SAST solution, developers no longer have to go to Stack Overflow or Reddit for advice on how to solve their problems.
SAST to support your existing software development lifecycle
Languages and frameworks change. A SAST solution should not. Therefore, it’s important to have a SAST solution that keeps up with the latest language updates and supports the latest languages. This allows us to support developers wherever they go.
Broad language support is also important to enable organizations to standardize on one solution across teams and across the organization.
For example, in the financial industry, organizations may need to support legacy languages such as COBOL, which still underpins many banking transactions today, as well as emerging mobile application development languages such as Flutter. Even with different developers working on both components, organizations can maximize efficiency by standardizing on a single application security platform rather than relying on a patchwork of vendors.
Finding APIs in Source Code
Recent high-profile data breaches have raised awareness of APIs as potential entry points to applications. OWASP also has “API Security Top 10”, which covers the main ways APIs can be compromised, including injection, security misconfiguration, and object-level authentication breakage.
One of the challenges with most API security solutions today is that they are all right-shifting. For example, WAF protects the runtime environment and DAST tests the compiled application.at the same time can It is said that “good security starts with good code”, but each API is different and comes with its own security challenges, so APIs test that maxim to some extent. Existing solutions also require APIs to be documented so that developers know what the WAF and DAST solution will protect and test. However, developers often contradict the API documentation, resulting in shadow APIs.
Luckily, all APIs in our application are written in code. At a minimum, a SAST solution should be able to discover API endpoints defined in your code and create an inventory of them. But ideally, you should also be able to see what vulnerabilities exist in each API, so you can prioritize which vulnerabilities to remediate based on the API’s business value. .
Integrate SAST and DAST on a single platform
Anyone who has spent time developing software, or who has been tasked with protecting the millions of lines of code that make up a modern application, knows that there are many industry-recognized techniques for scanning and testing applications. I understand there is a way. The purpose of scanning code with SAST is to detect coding errors that can lead to exploitable vulnerabilities. And we all know that vulnerable code is the primary cause of all known breaches today. However, the value of using both SAST and DAST tools is that they both detect different vulnerabilities.
However, if you’re using different tools, i.e. managing them differently through different interfaces, you’ll have to go to different places to see the vulnerabilities that are detected, and you’ll have to look at the vulnerabilities separately. You need to analyze, prioritize, and track remediated vulnerabilities separately.
Having SAST and DAST on the same platform means that vulnerabilities can be viewed in one place, managed and triaged through a single workflow/process, and sent to developers for remediation through the same workflow. increase. You can also integrate them at various points in the SDLC using a common set of integrations.
Additionally, DAST can also be used to test undocumented APIs if SAST can discover and inventory APIs in the source code and find undocumented APIs. . This allows you to get more value out of your SAST solutions by leveraging the results of your SAST solutions and improving your security outcomes in other areas in a 1+1=3 fashion.
Find a SAST solution that can make your shift happen
If you explore SAST solutions, you’ll no doubt hear a lot of promise to shift AppSec to the left. But that’s not enough anymore. In modern application development practices, new risks emerge as the use of APIs, open source code, and other innovations increases. Everything is an application now. Application security requires shift anywhere.
Note: This insightful article was professionally written and thoughtfully contributed by Avi Hein, Product Marketing Manager at Checkmarx.
