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Tag: SAST

  • Snyk Brings AI to DevSecOps

    Snyk Brings AI to DevSecOps

    Snyk today at its SnykCon 2020 conference announced a static application security testing (SAST) dubbed Snyk Code that incorporates an interpretable machine learning semantic code analysis engine the company gained through its acquisition of DeepCode earlier this year.

    The company also announced it has extended its alliance with Docker Inc. to become the exclusive provider of security insights for both Docker Official Images and future content certification programs from Docker. Available via Docker Hub, Docker Official Images are a collection of 166 curated container images that developers frequently reuse.

    At the same time, Snyk today announced it has integrated its vulnerability database with the IT monitoring service provided by Datadog as well as the IBM Cloud service.

    Snyk President Guy Podjardny said Snyk Code is aimed specifically at developers as part of an effort to advance the adoption of best DevSecOps practices. It provides visibility into application source code, open source libraries, container infrastructure and infrastructure as code to enable developers to better secure applications as they are being built.

    The company claims Snyk Code is up to 50 times faster than traditional SAST solutions, which would represent a major boost in productivity for developers who often don’t have the patience required to scan code as much as IT security teams would prefer.

    Snyk Code also curates machine learning models using the company’s curated vulnerability database to significantly reduce false positives. It also automatically models application programming interfaces (APIs) based on the best practices observed by the platform.

    Snyk Code is also designed to be integrated with CI/CD platforms to streamline DevSecOps workflows.

    Podjardny said Snyk went beyond simply productizing the Deep Code tool to incorporate capabilities that would specifically appeal to developers rather than cybersecurity teams. Given the volume of code that needs to be scanned before and after code is deployed in a production environment, Podjardny said it’s apparent that DevSecOps isn’t going to be achieved without augmenting developers with artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

    It’s not clear at what rate responsibility for IT security is shifting left toward developers. Beyond simply providing developers with the tools required to analyze code, workflows that DevOps and cybersecurity teams currently rely on must be better integrated. That’s a challenge, because the current rate at which DevOps teams are updating applications typically exceeds the ability of a limited team of cybersecurity professionals to keep pace. The days when cybersecurity teams could have weeks to review an application before being deployed are all but over.

    It may take a while for DevOps teams to gain confidence in AI tools. However, it’s clearly not feasible for human developers to identify every potential vulnerability within thousands of lines of code running on multiple platforms that can have any number of vulnerabilities which developers are not likely to know much about. As such, it’s not so much a question of if AI will play a major role in enabling DevSecOps as much as when.

  • Code Security: SAST, Shift-Left, DevSecOps and Beyond

    Code Security: SAST, Shift-Left, DevSecOps and Beyond

    Automation is the key to pushing code security beyond DevSecOps

    In virtually every industry, developers are dealing with ensuring the safety of their code. Regardless of whether it’s enterprise or applications for automotive, aviation or industrial controls, small systems or large systems, every organization struggles with security. In response, the industry continues to evolve to improve automation, speed of delivery and code reliability. Let’s consider the key building blocks of today’s application development ecosystem.

    Static analysis or static application security testing (SAST) helps enforce coding guidelines and detect undefined behavior, and is commonly used across the development ecosystem. One advantage of SAST is automation. Since it doesn’t require input, SAST is easy to introduce into an existing software development process where it will inspect source code builds and generate warnings. Coding guidelines such as MISRA, CERT C and others help avoid common programming mistakes. However, a second category, undefined behavior, is a bigger issue. That’s because undefined behavior introduces risk. For example, a null pointer dereference, buffer overrun or uninitialized variable are exploitable vulnerabilities. Depending on their severity, they typically will require issuing a patch for customers.

    Next, let’s consider DevSecOps, which spans development, security and operations. Although it is becoming widely adopted in enterprise markets such as financial services, markets such as automotive and industrial are lagging. Nevertheless, the emphasis on security is driving the DevSecOps push to make life easier for software developers and to bring them more in line with security and operations functions.

    For example, quick feedback cycles are extremely important in every industry. Consider a use case in which it can take up to an hour to deploy a newly developed feature or a fix once it is written. That’s unthinkable in today’s day and age when new source code must run almost instantaneously.

    One of the most important elements in DevSecOps revolves around a project’s branching strategy. In addition to the main branch, every developer uses their own separate branch. They develop their code and then merge it back into that main branch. A key requirement for the main branch is to maintain zero unresolved warnings so that it passes all functional testing.

    Therefore, before a developer on an individual branch can submit their work, it also needs to pass all functional tests. And all static analysis tests need to pass. When a pull request or merge request has unresolved warnings, it is rejected, must be fixed and resubmitted. These include functional test case failures and static analysis warnings.

    Functional test failures must be fixed. However, the root cause of the failure may be hard to find. A functional test error might say, “Input A should generate output B,” but C comes out instead, but there is no indication as to which piece of code to change. Static analysis, on the other hand, will reveal exactly where there is a memory leak and will provide detailed explanations for each warning. This is one way in which static analysis can help DevSecOps deliver the best and most secure code.

    Finally, let’s review Lean and shift-left, and see how they are connected.

    Lean development is focused on delivering value to the business. If we fix this defect, is the business going to get value? If we fix this warning, is the business going to get value? In other words, eliminate waste, make the right decisions, at the right point in time.

    Zero defects is actually one of the big underlying philosophies behind Lean. And of course, zero defects never means zero defects. It really means near-zero defects. For example, when there’s no value in fixing a particular defect, it can be classified as don’t fix. Meanwhile, if a defect exists such that an application will behave badly when a user inputs a negative value in the add function, there are two options: Fix it or don’t fix it, if the expectation is users will never input negative values.

    The objective is to achieve a zero-defect baseline and continuously improve. In this scenario, zero defects refers to source code problems as well as warnings from static analysis.

    Last is the concept of shift-left, which is a movement to bring certain processes closer to the developer—testing, in this case. By providing faster feedback cycles on new code, developers can avoid slowdowns. When working on source code projects, if regression tests run several days after a block is submitted and reveal defects, it can be difficult for developers to recall what they worked on at the time. Faster feedback that occurs in minutes, not days, improves quality and security. In this way, shift-left is a central component of DevSecOps and Lean. And static analysis is part of that shift-left.

    So what’s next? In a word, more automation. Making sure developers have as little cognitive overhead as possible will allow them to build code faster and more securely. This can be achieved by combining the concepts described above as well as analyzing code as soon as new functionality is developed using behavior-based testing or test-driven development. The ultimate goal is faster feedback cycles that accelerate development cycles.

  • What Developers Really Think About Pentesting

    What Developers Really Think About Pentesting

    A developer in their natural habitat is often spotted in a state of deep concentration, coding awesome features to tight deadlines. Feature-building is often our favorite part of the job, and really, it’s the fundamental outcome of the software development life cycle (SDLC). 

    However, as we have discussed before, many of us are still prioritizing features over security best practices. After all, in most organizations, it is set up to be someone else’s job and adequate security training for us is limited. Penetration testing and static analysis scanning tools (SAST) are just part of the overall process to mitigate security risks, operating rather independently from what we do — until the code bounces back to us for hotfixes, of course.

    It’s at that moment that many developers think, “Do the pentesters hate me?”

    These interactions often define a team and culture. The concerning thing is, the lack of communication, understanding and overall collaboration has created tension, at least on the side of the developer.

    Think about it: Imagine you’ve spent a few hundred hours sculpting a marvelous statue, and then someone comes along with a hammer and starts smashing bits off it after they’ve told you its foundations are not up to scratch. That’s the perceived dynamic between a tester and developer — the latter has their software darlings slaughtered by an outsider that hasn’t labored through the process with them; instead, they’ve extended the workload and delayed the satisfaction of shipping code. 

    Having moved into the security space long ago, I can see both sides of the story. And no, pentesters don’t hate developers. The pentester is in all likelihood, overworked and under a lot of pressure. As such, a constant stream of common security bugs that could be quite easily fixed at the code level take up time, resources and headspace away from the really serious issues. 

    I always saw pentesters as kind of like parents. They want you to do well, and when you don’t they’re not mad, just disappointed.

    Now that I’ve put that (perhaps slightly unfair) image in your mind, let’s explore this a little deeper. What has caused this world view among developers?

    Resentment for Being Told What to Do

    Nobody likes feeling as though they’ve done a bad job, or that someone doesn’t like their work. Sadly for developers, when static analysis and pentest results come back to them, it can feel like a report card. They’ve been given low grades, but at the end of the day, their bosses assess them on the features they’ve built and the time they’ve delivered them, not whether there were vulnerable elements in the software or not.

    For the poor pentester, this is a case of “don’t shoot the messenger.” It’s nothing personal — they are tasked with finding bugs, and they found them. Granted, at a person-to-person level, maybe some pentesters are grumpier than others, but they’re not (or shouldn’t be) out to crucify development teams. It would be far easier for both teams if they were on the same page with what constitutes security best practice. Developers are not expected to be perfect; realistically, the testing team is there to protect them from shipping vulnerable code.

    Minor Issues vs. Higher Priorities

    It’s true, a developer’s highest priority will always be the building of features, and in this crazy world of rapid digitization, it will have to be done at speed. While some coders have a personal interest in security and secure coding, the general sentiment is that security is “someone else’s problem,” which inevitably includes pentesters. 

    Most common vulnerabilities are indeed minor issues to remediate — once known, the fixes are simple to execute for things like cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection. The problem is, many developers don’t realize they’re introducing them in the first place, and these seemingly minor issues are the small window of opportunity an attacker needs to cause devastating problems for a company. According to Akamai, between November 2017 and March 2019, SQL injection vulnerabilities accounted for 65% of all web-based attack vectors. For a vulnerability that has had a known fix for more than 20 years, that is a sobering statistic. 

    Some pentest teams do assist in the remediation of security bugs, but others will provide a report of the bad news and expect developers to work through hotfixes, even if they have moved onto a different project by the time this happens. And in some cases, the development team may be faced with a report that includes bugs they can’t (or shouldn’t be expected to) fix. It still has to be part of the findings, and again, not taken personally.

    The “happy medium” for this would be pentesters, security personnel and development managers acting in more of a mentor role to ensure the team has what they need in terms of effective training and tools, giving individual coders the best chance to succeed and code securely from the very beginning of the SDLC. Both teams really should be meeting half-way to ensure security is considered from the start, as part of a healthy DevSecOps practice. 

    Lack of Knowledge vs. False Positives

    Static analysis is an element of the security process in the SDLC, and static analysis scanning tools (SAST) play a fundamental role. And yes, false positives are an issue with these and other types (DAST/IAST) of scanners. It’s an annoyance in what is already a slow process, requiring manual code review and putting pressure on both developers and pentesters alike. Pentesting personnel have taken time to meticulously set up custom rules to avoid inaccurate readings and provided company-specific guidance, yet some false readings slip through and end up in front of a head-scratching developer. 

    This process isn’t perfect, but the other problem is that many developers lack enough knowledge to mitigate a lot of common vulnerabilities on a consistent basis. With security training rare in tertiary education, and on-the-job training varying in its effectiveness, it stands to reason that there may be some overconfidence at play as well (and it’s not their fault, we as an industry need to get better at equipping them with what they need).

    Remediation Tasks

    Sometimes, there is an assumption by overworked engineers that pentesters are just hanging in the wings, waiting for the moment to strike by testing an application and raining on the development team’s parade. They are over-testing, they’re nitpicking, they’re creating extra work. 

    The only problem with that is they, too, are overworked (more so, in fact, the cybersecurity skills shortage is at dire levels and getting worse) and simply don’t have the time to test without reason. They are not the sole decision-makers in prioritizing testing; it could have been requested by senior leadership, a customer, as part of a security audit or even determined as a result of a bug bounty program. 

    For a developer, being pulled off current feature-building sprints to work on security fixes is annoying — especially if it’s not their work. Perhaps a previous team did the last update, or another vendor. However, security is everyone’s problem. That doesn’t mean every developer has to take ownership of security bugs as though they have made them all themselves, but they do need to come to the party in terms of security being a shared responsibility. 

    Where to from Here?

    Sometimes, a mindset shift can be all it takes to make significant headway in solving a problem. We’ve talked about the rather frosty reaction a developer has to less than favorable pentest results, but what if they could turn it into a challenge? Perhaps they could think of the pentester as a friendly competitor; someone they can beat at their own game. After all, a security-aware developer that can eliminate common bugs as they write code is going to make their job much more difficult. By contrast, a developer with no focus on security is going to be comprehensively bested by their pentester counterparts when they can easily break their software. 

    Pentesters and developers may not be joined in harmony 100% of the time, but their relationship can be vastly improved when an organization addresses security as a key priority, and empowers teams with the right knowledge and tools to succeed — especially developers. It comes down to whether a company-wide, positive security culture is a priority, and if we are to fight the (currently) losing battle against common vulnerabilities, it absolutely should be.

  • 3 DevOps Security Best Practices Your Organization Can’t Afford To Ignore

    3 DevOps Security Best Practices Your Organization Can’t Afford To Ignore

    CI/CD pipelines are at the core of daily operations for many businesses today. These processes, when set up correctly, help to keep the delivery process consistent by automating many manual tasks and providing visibility into how the software is being worked on.

    DevOps is also the place in your technology stack where your infrastructure has access to many different resources, from development and production environment to analytics keys and code signing credentials. The more resources your pipelines have access to (secure secrets, proprietary code, databases, etc.), the more important it is to keep your CI/CD system secure.

    In this article, we talk about the different parts of DevOps security for CI/CD pipelines and highlight a number of ways to improve on these aspects. We usually divide security practices into three parts that you can address with different kinds of solutions:

    1. Secure pipeline configuration
    2. Code and Git history analysis
    3. Security policy enforcement

    All three aspects are equally important. Let’s take a deeper look at these categories and ways to address them.

    Secure Pipeline Configuration

    It is possible to use your CI/CD pipeline configuration to make security issues less likely to happen.

    First, safely store secrets that you use in your pipelines for connecting to databases and third-party services. Depending on the CI platform you use, you may have the option to use encrypted-at-rest environment variables, or to use the contexts feature. Contexts are used to provide access to environment variables across projects. Their use can also be restricted to specific security group members as defined by the organization’s administrator.

    Another option is to use a third-party solution to dynamically fetch secrets from their secure storage for your jobs. To ensure that none of your credentials become exposed to those who shouldn’t see them, you should never check these into your repository in plain text, even if the repository is private.

    Second, for sensitive files like code signing keys, I recommend adding an additional layer of isolation between your encrypted files and your repository for added security. Keep them encrypted in your repository and store the decryption key in the environment variables or contexts, only decrypting them inside your CI/CD jobs when they are needed. This makes it even more difficult to expose or leak these highly sensitive files.

    Third, you never want to leave your CI/CD environment running without monitoring it. Therefore, make sure that the containers and VMs used for your pipelines are destroyed after jobs that require sensitive information finish running. 

    Fourth, pay extra attention to how your CI/CD system handles builds for pull requests that come from forks of your repository. If your build stages require secrets to work, forked pull requests might gain access to them through your pipelines. 

    By addressing these four aspects you can significantly reduce the risk of security incidents due to your CI/CD pipeline configuration. Next up, code and Git history analysis.

    Code and Git History Analysis

    We all love Git for its comprehensive history of changes, being able to look through the history of the project with a simple CLI command and see who has most recently changed a line of code, among other benefits. This also means that any sensitive information that makes it into the Git history can be accessible to attackers if a Git repository is exposed, even if the most recent state of the repository doesn’t contain the secrets anymore.

    Trufflehog and GitLeaks are two tools that can help you identify secrets that have been committed to the codebase so that you can deactivate and replace them. These two tools will also scan your Git history for traces of secrets that your team might have added to the repository in the past.

    Once your Git history is clear of secrets, you can proceed to the next level: making sure that your current revision doesn’t contain any vulnerable dependencies.

    Static Application Security Testing (SAST) techniques can look through the application in your commit and analyze its dependencies. If any dependencies contain any issues or known security vulnerabilities, your commit will be marked as insecure and won’t be allowed to proceed to deployment.

    Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) techniques go one step further and spin up a copy of your production environment inside your CI job in order to scan the resulting containers and executables. The dynamic aspect helps the system catch dependencies that are being loaded at launch time, for example, as those won’t be caught by SAST.

    Security Policy Enforcement

    Some security aspects can’t be statically checked based on known vulnerabilities, but rather are specific to your particular company, and therefore need to be codified as policies. These can take the form of automated or manual compliance checks.

    Certain tasks such as reviewing the list of all accounts that have access to your repositories, or making sure your onboarding and offboarding processes are in sync, will be manual. We recommend that you set reminders to perform these regularly.

    Some tasks actually can be automated quite easily. For example, third-party services can provide a convenient way to codify a set of rules that will be matched against in your CI pipeline, e.g., proving compliance with the regulations that govern your data. If there is a mismatch, the build will fail.

    Some of the Important Parts Can’t Be Automated

    Keeping your CI/CD pipelines secure is more important today than ever before as automating your CI/CD practices requires more access to development and production environments, analytics keys and code signing credentials than in the past. The hard thing about security is that if you only get one of the three categories right, you won’t be 33% secure. You will be 0% secure until you get all the bases covered.

    With the approaches outlined above, you’ll be in a much more secure position than you would be without them. However, some of the aspects that matter the most for CI/CD security can’t be automated or detected with an automated policy. These aspects are shaped by the behavior and culture within your team.

    A DevSecOps Mindset

    Your team is your most valuable set of security researchers because they know your applications best and constantly work on them. Have you implemented a clear process for your teammates to report security issues if they find any, and do you dedicate time to fix the security flaws they find? Do you celebrate those who report issues openly? In many companies, the answer isn’t an immediate “yes” to these, and it should be.

    How long does it take for someone on your team to report suspicious activity? Do they need to post in multiple Slack channels to get attention, or is there a streamlined process to get an issue like this looked into? How do you treat those who report false positives — do you blame them for wasting the team’s time, or do you hold a blameless post-mortem so that everyone on your team learns from the mistakes? All these questions can make or break your security-minded development culture.

  • 5 Ways to Detect Application Security Vulnerabilities Sooner to Reduce Costs and Risk

    5 Ways to Detect Application Security Vulnerabilities Sooner to Reduce Costs and Risk

    Security testing has always been an important step in the application development process. Yet, traditional measures often occur too late in the process to effectively find and fix vulnerabilities before causing costly production delays, or worse, putting organizations at risk for potential security breaches.

    To minimize security-related costs and risks, testing needs to occur sooner and more frequently throughout the development process. But, how can you accomplish this while keeping pace with growing application development demands?

    Looking at automation can help. Development teams have been using automation to streamline manual activities such as build, deployment and functional testing for years now, and it is time security testing joins the mix. By integrating automated security validation into the continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline, you can catch vulnerabilities sooner, reducing the potential risk and financial impact.

    In this article, we’ll look at five ways automated technology tools can help safeguard the CI/CD pipeline: SAST, detecting OSS vulnerabilities, identifying compromising credentials, DAST and verifying cloud infrastructure security.

    Your CI pipeline provides a ready-made check-in point to install the following automated security gates and pinpoint vulnerabilities.

    Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

    SAST provides the earliest check-in opportunity, allowing you to identify potential issues at the coding stage, so you can resolve problems without breaking builds or allowing vulnerabilities to get passed to the final application release.

    Commercial solutions such as Checkmarx help to identify hundreds of security vulnerabilities and weaknesses in custom code. You can also leverage many open source linters for your specific platforms to detect various vulnerability patterns that can compromise code security.

    Detecting Open Source Software Vulnerabilities

    Just because the code is secure doesn’t mean the entire application is protected. Most applications use a large number of dependencies, or third-party open source software (OSS) components. These may have various security vulnerabilities and put your application at risk.

    Tools such as Whitesource Bolt and Black Duck can scan all of your projects, not only to detect OSS components, but also identify and provide fixes for any known vulnerabilities. 

    Identifying Compromising Credentials

    Human error is always a security concern, especially when it comes to credentials. Just consider how many times you’ve heard of developers committing code only to later realize they’d accidentally included a password. These errors can lead to high-cost consequences for organizations.

    There are many tools that scan for secrets and credentials that can be accidentally committed to a source code repository. One example is Microsoft Credential Scanner (CredScan). Perform this scan in the PR/CI build to identify the issue as soon as it happens so they can be changed before this becomes a problem.

    Once an application is deployed, you can continue to scan for vulnerabilities through the following automated continuous delivery pipeline capabilities.

    Dynamic Application Security Testing

    Unlike SAST, which looks for potential security vulnerabilities by examining an application from the inside—at the source code—Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) looks at the application while it is running to identify any potential vulnerabilities that a hacker could exploit.

    OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an open source tool for performing pen testing on web applications and APIs. Pen testing helps ensure that there are no security vulnerabilities hackers can manipulate. It can be installed as a client application or come configured on a docker container. OWASP ZAP scans can be incorporated into your pipeline to check every deployment for security vulnerabilities.

    Verifying Cloud Infrastructure Security

    Finally, in addition to validating the application, the infrastructure should be validated to check for vulnerabilities. When using a public cloud, deploying the application and shared infrastructure is easy, so it’s important to validate that everything has been done securely.

    Each public cloud includes tools to help verify that the infrastructure has been provisioned securely. APIs can be leveraged to check immediately after deployment in lower environments to help ensure any infrastructure security issues are caught before they get to production. Additionally, tools such as InSpec provide compliance-as-code to enforce the intent of provisioned infrastructure is always being met.

    Enabling continuous security validation through the CI/CD pipeline can help fortify applications against an expanding array of security threats that can lead to significantly higher costs and exposure. At the same time, automation tools can provide added layers of protection while meeting the organization application development demands.

  • Five Tips to Approach DevSecOps Training

    Five Tips to Approach DevSecOps Training

    Developers are on the front lines when it comes to protecting their organizations from cyberattacks. As we’ve seen with the hacks of Monster.com or the Fortnite vulnerability, 2019 has been a trying year for organizations who have failed to protect their applications and websites.

    With an increase of cyberthreats today, it is vital that organizations and developers incorporate standard security protocols within DevOps, a practice known as DevSecOps. Whether exploring these practices around security training, skills, metrics and more in the industry, it’s important to understand how each group fits into the security process.

    Here are five top tips for security training to successfully implement a DevSecOps strategy.

    Recognize Security is a Shared Responsibility

    Many departments throughout an organization make the mistake of thinking the responsibility of keeping their organization secure lies solely with the security department. However, with nearly 200 cyberattacks happening every hour, it’s important everyone gets on board in protecting applications and networks. As the creators behind our modern-day websites and applications, it’s especially important for developers.

    DevOps and security teams need to be taught how to approach security jointly. When approached separately, it is impossible to achieve DevSecOps. Without DevSecOps, the applications and websites used by consumers everyday will not be secure, and there could be security, quality, legal and reputational implications. Security is now being seen as a fundamental aspect of a consumer’s decision, and consumers gravitate towards brands that are more secure.

    Ensure the Entire Development Team Understands Common Cyberthreats and Application Vulnerabilities

    In today’s world, it is especially important for development and operations specialists to understand application vulnerabilities, and best practices to avoid those vulnerabilities. Without this knowledge, developers and their teams won’t understand just how important security is until it is too late.

    Staying on top of the evolving threat landscape, however, can be a daunting task. After all, there is a lot of information out there. The first step to staying informed is to compile a short list of reliable, valid security news sources. Another step could be creating an internal method for the security team to share details on new vulnerabilities with the development teams.

    Unfortunately, hackers tend to exploit vulnerabilities that were accidentally created by DevOps. In order to fight this, DevOps specialists should be made aware and trained in secure programming, secure application configurations and use of secure frameworks.

    Incorporate Just-in-Time Learning into Your Strategy

    Traditional training courses, especially in the security sector, have some challenges. Many universities and free online resources will offer courses online in cybersecurity. While this can be beneficial in continued training, it can take a significant amount of time to complete the course, and some projects require a certain level of knowledge sooner rather than later. Most courses need to be taken well in advance of a project, where the acquired knowledge will then be applied.

    For example, say developer X just started a course in how to protect from vulnerability Y. At the same time, developer X has a project with code that could be vulnerable to Y due in the next two weeks. With the tight deadline, developer X may not be able to get the knowledge they need to be able to protect their application in time.

    In order to combat this, the security industry now offers real-time learning. Otherwise known as “just-in-time learning,” this approach is giving the employees the much-needed information exactly when they need it. These courses usually come hand-in-hand with using application security testing technology, enabling rapid remediation of a detected vulnerability. For example, when a new security technology is introduced to the organization for development purposes, just-in-time learning would involve developers learning to use it on current projects in real time.

    Avoid Making DevOps Specialists into Security Experts

    While it is important for DevOps practitioners to have knowledge of security best practices, it’s important to remember they should be focusing on their task at hand: creating applications. Security transparency is a critical condition for security adoption by the DevOps team, so it is important the technologies developers rely on are transparent. However, security technologies should not distract DevOps specialists from development and operation. DevOps specialists should be security aware and applying their best security development practices.

    The technologies should test applications and get results to those who need them. DevOps practitioners should then use those results, without having to worry about learning and running sophisticated security detection and protection technologies.

    Remember the Goal is to Educate, Not Embarrass

    Even when using the above tactics, it is still quite possible developers will miss a vulnerability and SAST, DAST, IAST and SCA technologies may discover it first. When this happens, it is easy for DevOps specialists to become embarrassed because their managers see the results first. No matter the experience level, developers will likely at some point make a mistake that can cause a vulnerability–which ultimately gets back to their supervisors and peers.

    Rather than feel embarrassed over the security technologies, developers need to learn how to utilize them to their advantage. For example, modern SAST allows developers to conduct tests out of an IDE and return the test results to the same one. The developer is the only one who will see these tests, and therefore, they can be the one to review and remediate a problem. This process helps eliminate the shame developers feel, and it will instead be replaced with education, security and confidence.

    Cyberthreats are not going away, and all signs are pointing to the fact that they are only going to get more advanced in the future. However, with adequate training and cybersecurity education for development teams, organizations can stay ahead of adversaries and fortify their application security.

    — Joseph Feiman

  • Denim Group Awarded Hybrid Analysis Mapping Patents by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

    Issued Patents Will Drive Innovation in Managing Large Volumes of Data Generated by Application Security Testing Programs

    San Antonio, TX – October 30, 2018 – – Denim Group, the leading independent application security firm, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded the company two patents which will provide a method of correlating and merging static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) for web and mobile applications. The official name of the Hybrid Analysis Mapping (HAM) patents are as follows: Method of Correlating Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing Results for a Web Application (Patent #10,043,012) and Method of Correlating Static and Dynamic Application Security Testing Results for a Web and Mobile Application (Patent #10,043,004).

    The continued proliferation of websites, web applications, and mobile applications that handle sensitive data makes securing an organization’s application portfolio a major challenge. Effective application security programs utilize multiple types of analysis to test applications for security vulnerabilities, resulting in a high volume of data produced. This increased data can be valuable when it provides deeper insight into vulnerabilities; however, it can also make the problem of identifying areas of concern harder to manage by requiring further manual reviews by the analyst or highlighting large numbers of vulnerabilities and weaknesses that are of low value or priority. Without positive correlation of large data sets, the value of vulnerability data sets is diminished.

    Denim Group has implemented the technology from these two Hybrid Analysis Mapping patents into their vulnerability resolution management platform, ThreadFix, in order to help organizations efficiently manage the large volume of data that is generated by an organization’s application security testing program. This technology makes ThreadFix the first platform able to correlate SAST and DAST results without requiring a runtime agent. As a result, organizations report a 71% success rate in matching SAST and DAST results and an average reduction of 15-35% in overall findings. ThreadFix improves the ability of the application development team to identify vulnerabilities found by both testing tools and prioritize them in order of degree to be addressed.

    “We are honored to be awarded these two patents by the USPTO to help organizations more effectively manage their application security testing data,” said CTO of Denim Group, Dan Cornell. “By enabling organizations to more accurately correlate the results of static scans with dynamic scans and manage the data that is generated by their testing program more efficiently, we are delivering a significant breakthrough for today’s industry professionals in the application security space.”