In the DevSecOps paradigm, the need for manual testing and review is minimised in favour of speed and agility. Security input should be provided as early as possible, and at every stage of the process. Automation, therefore, becomes key. Responsibility for quality and security as well as decision-making power should also shift to the local teams delivering working software. Appropriate security training must be provided to these teams to reduce the reliance on dedicated security resources.
I created a diagram illustrating a simplified software development lifecycle to show where security-enhancing practices, input and tests are useful. The process should be understood as a continuous cycle but is represented in a straight line for the ease of reading.
There will, of course, be variations in this process – the one used in your organisation might be different. The principles presented here, however, can be applied to any development lifecycle, your specific pipeline and tooling.
I deliberately kept this representation tool and vendor agnostic. For some example tools and techniques at every stage, feel free to check out the DevSecOps tag on this site.
There is a strong correlation between code quality and security: more bugs lead to more security vulnerabilities. Simple coding mistakes can cause serious security problems, like in the case of Apple’s ‘goto fail’ and OpenSSL’s ‘Heartbleed‘, highlighting the need for disciplined engineering and testing culture.
An open source tool that is gaining a lot of momentum in this space is Semgrep. It supports multiple languages and integrates well in the CI/CD pipeline. You can run Semgrep out of a Docker container and the test results are conveniently displayed in the command line interface.
The rule set is still relatively limited compared to other established players and it might find fewer issues. You can write your own rules, however, and things are bound to improve as the tool continues to develop with contributions from the community.
A more well-known tool in this space is SonarQube. You can still use a free Community Edition for basic testing but advanced enterprise-level features would require a paid subscription. CI/CD integration is possible, inter plugins (like the one for ESLint) are also available.
SonarQube has a dashboard view which scores your code across reliability, security, maintainability and other metrics.
As with any tool of this type, to get the best use out of it, some initial configuration is required to reduce the number of false positives, so don’t be discouraged by the high number of bugs or “code smells” being discovered initially.
Keeping in mind the fact that no amount of automation can guarantee finding all the vulnerabilities, I found SonarQube’s analysis around Security Hotspots particularly interesting. It also estimates a time required to pay down the tech debt which can serve as a good indicator of maintainability of your codebase.
It is important to remember that static code analysis tools are not a substitute for the testing culture, code reviews, threat modelling and secure software engineering. They can, however, be a useful set of guardrails for engineers and act as an additional layer in your defence in depth strategy. Although these tools are unlikely to catch all the issues, they can certainly help raise awareness among software developers about quality and security improvements, alert about potential vulnerabilities before they become a problem and prevent the accumulation of tech and security debt in your company.
Using abstractions to think about risks is a useful technique to identify the ways an attacker could compromise a system.
There are various approaches to perform threat modelling but at the core, it’s about understanding what we are building, what can go wrong with it and what we should do about it.
Here is a good video by SAFECode introducing the concept:
The 2011 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors is a list of the most widespread and critical errors that can lead to serious vulnerabilities in software. They are often easy to find, and easy to exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software, steal data, or prevent the software from working at all.
Cyber Security Leadership 