How Can Developers Avoid Software Vulnerabilities?
SAST tools are known to return thousands of security vulnerabilities, even for small applications, which can easily overwhelm any software developer. After spending hours writing code, every developer dreads hearing that they'll have to spend additional hours remediating the code.
Don’t get us wrong, SAST tools are absolutely essential to test the security posture of an application. But, even the best SAST tools in the market are prone to errors, duplicate results, and false positives.
In addition, 65 percent of developers in organizations experiencing digital transformation also say they feel the pressure to develop applications faster than ever before. This can leave developers feeling overwhelmed, and at odds with their AppSec teams.
Building secure applications from the ground up
While security testing tools are helpful in finding coding errors that result in exploitable vulnerabilities, building secure applications isn’t just about testing. Application security requires starting with a secure design and empowering developers with tools to implement the correct and relevant security measures at the time code is written.
When secure coding standards and regulatory controls for each application are defined for developers, along with sample codes, and just-in-time training, vulnerabilities can be avoided.
In most organizations, developers write code, and then vulnerabilities are identified using code scanners or penetration tests. Based on the organizations’ risk tolerance, two options are considered:
- Remediating the vulnerabilities, which means spending a significant amount of time and thus delaying product releases. This clearly leads to developers working again on the same piece of code.
- Accepting the risks, which means allowing products with critical vulnerabilities to be released. We all know where this might end — you might get lucky and nobody bothers to steal your company’s sensitive customer data. But what if they do?
Because of the rising number of breaches and concerns about data privacy, more and more organizations are “shifting security left” and ensuring code is developed securely.
Is there a solution that can help you code securely?
Coding is challenging work, so injecting security during the development process can be time-consuming which may delay delivery deadlines. However, the automation of security and compliance processes can integrate security early in the application development process without the help of security professionals.
This not only makes secure coding simple but also reduces the number of vulnerabilities discovered during the testing phase.
Imagine a tool that translates complex security and compliance guidelines into easy-to-follow tasks so that your code is secure? What if this same solution is integrated with your issue tracker, like JIRA, so that you don't need to learn any new systems or tools?
Explore SD Elements by Security Compass.
SD Elements reduces 92 percent of vulnerabilities by automating proactive security processes and can be integrated into DevOps tools.