Hint: The question is irrelevant.
Static and dynamic application security testing, called SAST and DAST respectively, are compared to each other once in while. Both being quite different automated solutions with the same goal, this is understandable. It’s important to understand that these technologies are not replaceable with one another. This is Bedirhan and in this post we will go through a discussion why this is so. Let’s dig in to find out more…
Here’s the key difference between the two technologies; static security testing is executed on applications that are not running, these tools work on the code resting, hence the name static. …
Hardship in producing a secure software
Not a single developer, analyst, project manager or business owner want to own an insecure software. Just like customers would never want to trust any insecure application with their valuable data. Having or using a rock solid secure application is a desired thing, but is it possible at all and what can we do about it?
This is Bedirhan from the CodeThreat team, and in this post I’ll try to pinpoint difficulties of producing a secure software. First thing first; the number of new vulnerabilities published each year has a quite disturbing but factual outcome;
It is pretty hard to…
Program analysis fight against imperfection
It’s impossible to provide a correct solution to non-trivial security questions for security automation tools. Nevertheless, this limitation doesn’t actually undermine their value being great helpers to make our applications secure. Without the automated tools it’s quite hard to keep up with the speed of current development practices.
That being said, for example, we can’t build an algorithm to check whether a target program is SQL Injection free or not.
Sure, there are good tools to check this interesting property, however, never with %100 certainty. Please read our previous blog post for a proof. …
Security testing automation is stranded by Gödel
Everyone who has dealt with developing a comprehensive automated security testing tool knows that it is a challenging task. Staying on top of new security bugs and making the tool performant is one thing and keeping false alarms (false positives) and missed bugs (false negatives) as low as possible is something else. But there’s a one more and inherent limitation to any automated software security testing solution; SAST or DAST…
As a side note, we have written about soundness and precision in one of our earlier post and you can read about them in order to learn some fundamental terms…
There’s more to it than meets the eye…
Building is harder than breaking. Well, at least most of the time. Building a quality software takes months maybe not years. And I’m not aware of a security weakness finding which takes a few weeks let alone months. Having said this I also have to admit that I don’t have any first-hand government level, cyber warfare exploit experience. So, what do I know… Nevertheless, A similar comparison is possible with fixing and hacking. Most of the time the fixing might seem easier, but it’s not. There are various difficulties a developer has to tackle to mitigate a security bug.
This…
A journey of a software security request…
This is the story of a community triggered security request which was worked by the related project team and fixed by increasing the awareness through the sample code and the official documentation over a two-years period.
This is Bedirhan and in this post I’ll try to give you a pretty nice example of different phases and views of handling security concerns in real life. By the way I came across this example purely by chance and it was somehow exhilarating to dig the story further.
It All Starts with Curiosity
Here’s the starting point of the story. I…
Do we actually need it for secure software?
Before I draw all the flashes of anger from all the software security-aware professionals out there, I insist you give some time to contemplate on the subtitle for some time.
Input validation is the heavily recommended technique in order to prevent malicious attacks against our software albeit from analyst and developer perspective it is sometimes treated as a burden. In this post, you can find a discussion over whether we can write secure code without using input validation whatsoever.
This is Bedirhan and I’ll present some solid examples that allows to ask that “obnoxious looking” question in a short while…
Automation is a key process for secure software development. It is a requirement because we are extremely short on resources and we need to catch-up with the speed of development to production. This is Bedirhan and in this post I’ll try to explain what security automation brings into our dubious battle against hackers. Equally importantly, I’ll try to list the stuff we should know about any security automation technology so that we never assume that we win the battle when we have them in-place.
We produce huge amounts of code and it should be tested, deployed & maintained. Sure, we…
Implement, Measure, Improve…
An intrinsic part of our security static code analysis solution is benchmarking. Obviously, for such a complex and undecidable [1] area of computation, we needed to have a yard-stick to measure our progress, quality and compare our approach with others. This is Bedirhan and I’ll try to give an overview of one of the benchmarking projects [2] we produce and continuously use in our CodeThreat solution.
As a personal note, in the ooold days I tried the same with web application crawlers and it turned out to be a very prolific open-source tool for benchmarking web application security scanners. …
Over a distributed series of posts, we’ll try to explain some of the fundamentals of static code analysis. Armed with this information, it will be easier for security professionals, developers to comprehend and perhaps compare the internals of such tools, and CodeThreat is one of them.
This is Bedirhan and in this post, I’ll go through a few important attributes used to explain output quality in program analysis. Moreover, some of these attributes describe how tools approach to the static code analysis problem.
Let’s first start with these quadruple; True Positive, True Negative, False Negative and False Positive. We may…
