Why implement SAST tools?

Developers need to proactively and continuously remediate potential risks to produce safe software. That’s why a tool automatically scanning their craft can be so helpful. Furthermore, SAST tools produce reports that are needed to assess an application security posture. Knowing the number and criticality of issues present in any application is mandatory before deploying it to production.

Software analysis and testing help strengthen the source code leading to more reliable and dependable applications.

In DevOps environments, a continuous integration pipeline must onboard Static Application Security Testing tools to ensure that the application respects good security practices. Not integrating security in the development life cycle will result in very costly mistakes.

Unfortunately, static analysis tools can create a large number of false positives and also have a bad reputation for quickly causing alert fatigue to developers. Also, most of these tools won’t scan previous revisions of the code, which will lead to developers not being alerted about historical  vulnerabilities like leaked secrets. Indeed, even a hardcoded secret hiding deep in a never-deployed commit could be exploited by an attacker.

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How can you guarantee that your software is secure?

The quick answer results in three investments: team training & coaching, security testing, and monitoring of your application.

What should be in every application security program to make sure that the source code is safe is a combination of multiple, stage-specific tools able to integrate together and into the SDLC:

• During design & implementation → Static Analysis Security Testing + Manual review
• During testing & integration → Dynamic Analysis Security Testing
• During maintenance → Software Composition Analysis Software (SCA) to ensure your applications components or dependencies are fully patched and up to date
• Throughout the entire development cycle → Secret Detection
• After deployment → Pentesting