In the ever-evolving software development landscape, developers share a common objective: safeguarding their source code without delving too deeply into security complexities. However, the reality is that many developers lack the specific knowledge needed to avoid insecure programming patterns, use secure APIs, or identify complex vulnerabilities that may affect various components of an application, often developed by multiple teams. This issue underscores the significance of incorporating Static Application Security Testing (SAST) into a comprehensive application security strategy.
Static Application Security Testing has emerged as a prominent term in application security testing. The general opinion is that SAST is just the process of using tools to scan application code for vulnerabilities. However, many people are unaware that it encompasses an even larger environment than that.
What is SAST?
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is a set of technologies designed to identify and remediate application vulnerabilities effectively. SAST enables organizations to address vulnerabilities early in the software development life cycle (SDLC) and scans an application before compiling the source code. During this phase, developers conduct code analysis to identify the specific line of code containing the vulnerability, allowing them to resolve security issues and perform re-testing before deploying the software to production.
Why is SAST an Important Security Activity?
Static Application Security Testing uses machine learning capabilities such as intelligent finding analytics (IFA) and intelligent code analytics (ICA) procedure to check code for potential coding design flaws that might expose vulnerabilities in an application. This analysis detects various security concerns, like SQL injections, un-sanitized input, error handling issues, etc. and reduces false positives, highlighting the most critical issues.
SAST application security testing is a critical security activity for several compelling factors:
- Early Detection of Vulnerabilities: SAST occurs early in the software development life cycle since it does not require a working application and can occur without code execution. It assists developers in identifying vulnerabilities during the early phases of development and promptly resolving bugs without interrupting builds or passing on vulnerabilities to the application’s final release.
- Automated and Efficient Code Review Process: SAST streamlines the code review method, enhancing efficiency and lowering the time and effort needed for manual code review. This automation allows even large and complicated codebases to be wholly inspected for security flaws.
- Identifying Security Vulnerabilities: SAST identifies various common security vulnerabilities, including cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and authentication errors, by scanning the codebase. It reduces the risk associated with these widely known security threats.
- Integration into the Software Development Lifecycle: SAST integrates smoothly into the SDLC, allowing application security testing to become an essential part of the development process, enabling a culture of security awareness among developers, and minimizing the interruption to workflow.
- Ensure Security Standards Compliance: SAST assists organizations in adhering to security standards and industry regulations. It reduces non-compliance risk by finding and fixing security vulnerabilities in development.
- Cost-Effective Security Testing: Discovering security flaws early in development is less expensive than resolving them post-production. SAST assists organizations to save on the high costs associated with security breaches, data breaches, and emergency patching.
Starting with static application security testing early on in a project is an intelligent move rather than waiting until there is a lot of code to analyze. The development and security teams may struggle to fix issues effectively if you wait too long.
Key Steps to Run Static Application Security Testing Tool
You can include SAST in your organization’s development process in several ways.
- Obtaining the proper tool: Select the right SAST tool that can perform code reviews for your programming languages and understand the framework on which your software depends.
- Organize scanning infrastructure to use the tool: This step includes addressing licensing requirements, configuring access controls and permissions, and getting necessary resources like servers and databases to launch the tool.
- Personalize the tool: Adjust the tool to meet the organization’s requirements. By implementing new rules or changing existing ones, you may customize them to minimize false positives or identify more security flaws. Embed the tool into the development environment, create dashboards to monitor scan results, and generate custom reports.
- Prioritize and onboard applications: Specify application priorities and onboard them when the tool is ready. Select the high-risk applications to scan first if you have a lot of applications. The goal is to have your apps onboarded and frequently monitored, synchronizing application scans with release cycles, daily or monthly builds, or code check-ins.
- Evaluate scan results: In this step, false positives are eliminated by evaluating the scan results. The deployment teams should be notified about the issues as soon as they are complete so that they can be correctly and quickly resolved.
- Provide governance and training: Give your development teams sufficient guidance and training to ensure they use the web application vulnerability scanning tools correctly. For SAST to produce the best results, every team member needs training on how to use it appropriately.
You should encourage Static Application Security Testing within the development and management teams as one of the critical web application vulnerabilities scanning tools every firm should have.
Leveraging HCL AppScan in Security Testing
HCL AppScan, an application security testing tool, is crucial in identifying and remediating web application security issues. With HCL AppScan, developers, DevOps teams, and security professionals gain access to a comprehensive suite of technologies that identify and address web security issues throughout the software development lifecycle. It provides best-in-class testing capabilities for conducting comprehensive assessments of apps and identifying potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
SAST identifies application flaws in source code early in the application lifecycle. With easy integration into IDEs (integrated development environments) and CI/CD pipelines, developers can secure code as they create it and implement automated security into development.
HCL AppScan SAST is available in multiple deployment options and it’s functionality includes:
- 98% decrease in false positives because of intelligent findings analytics
- APIs with intelligent code analytics coverage
- Auto-repair capabilities
- Supporting 30+ languages and frameworks
- Jenkins and GitHub integrations
Contact us to learn how AppScan SAST can help you develop software that is secure by design – and avoid late-stage vulnerabilities – by integrating security testing early in SDLC.