What is Secure Code Scanning?

Secure code scanning, or secure code review, is the practice of assessing code for potential security vulnerabilities and code quality issues. It uses specialized tools and techniques to identify security flaws, code smells, errors, bugs, hard-coded secrets, and data privacy risks in first-party code, third-party libraries, container images, and public repositories. Think of it like using grammar-checking tools to eliminate spelling and grammar errors in documents. Secure code scanning helps ensure only high-quality, trusted code is deployed to production environments by proactively detecting potential vulnerabilities and inefficiencies. It's a comprehensive process that goes beyond simple error detection, analyzing code from multiple perspectives to identify weaknesses that could be exploited by attackers. By incorporating secure code scanning into the software development lifecycle, teams can enhance software security and quality while reducing the risk of costly and damaging security incidents.

Why is Code Scanning Important?

Rapid software release cycles often result in the deployment of vulnerable software due to shortened development times. Code scanning enables development teams to schedule periodic scans or integrate scans into IDEs, allowing vulnerabilities to be identified and resolved early in the development process. This reduces the cost and complexity of remediation. Code scanning incorporates secure coding practices into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), enhancing software security and quality while reducing the frequency and severity of data breaches. Data breaches can lead to non-compliance penalties, lawsuits, reputational damage, financial losses, and loss of customer trust. 

The Basic Steps to Code Scanning

• Define the Scope: Clearly delineate the software, codebases, and modules to be covered by the code scanner. Determine whether to run scheduled scans, continuous scans, or both. Scheduled scans are cost-effective and conducted at set intervals, while continuous scans incur higher costs but provide real-time vulnerability detection. 
• Choose Scanning Tools: Select a combination of SAST, DAST, secrets scanning, and SCA tools to achieve comprehensive code security throughout the SDLC.
•  Integrate with Pipelines and Environments: Integrate code scanners with build systems, development and CI/CD pipelines, and code repositories to enable automated, on-the-fly scanning during new commits or builds. 
• Customize the Tool: Configure the tool to incorporate in-house security policies, standards, and rule sets to tailor scans to specific requirements. 
• Run the Scan: Begin scanning as early as possible in the application's lifecycle, before the source code is compiled, to detect all code issues before changes become overly complex and time-consuming. 
• Review Results: Analyze scan results to pinpoint the sources of vulnerabilities, bugs, and code smells. Comprehensive vulnerability reports are critical at this stage. 
• Fix Code Issues: Address code security risks by modifying code, patching vulnerabilities, or implementing other measures recommended by the tools. Tools offering in-line feedback on fixing code issues are particularly helpful. 
• Continuously Monitor: Rescan periodically to verify that identified issues have been properly resolved and ensure ongoing code security.

The Benefits of Code Scanning

Vulnerability Detection During Development

Code scanning provides a critical advantage by enabling the early identification of vulnerabilities during the development phase. Addressing vulnerabilities after an application has been deployed to production can be both expensive and time-consuming, often requiring significant resources to develop and distribute patches. Moreover, there is an inherent risk that these vulnerabilities could be exploited in a live environment. By contrast, code scanning allows developers to detect and remediate security flaws before the application is released, thereby eliminating potential cybersecurity risks and reducing the associated costs and complexities of post-deployment fixes.

Reduced False Positives and Errors

One of the significant challenges in application security is dealing with false positives and errors that can arise from scanning tools. Code scanning mitigates this issue by integrating multiple application security testing solutions. This multi-tool approach helps cross-verify findings and minimizes the occurrence of false alarms. As a result, developers and security teams can focus their efforts on genuine threats rather than spending time investigating misleading alerts. This efficiency is particularly valuable in fast-paced development environments where resources are often stretched thin.

Enhanced Infrastructure Security

Code scanning plays a pivotal role in strengthening the overall security of an organization's infrastructure. It conducts thorough tests on all application code, including dependencies that might otherwise introduce security weaknesses. By ensuring the security of these components, organizations can protect not only individual applications but also the broader digital infrastructure that supports them. This comprehensive security check helps mitigate risks across the entire ecosystem, reducing the attack surface and protecting sensitive data and systems.

Actionable Insights

Code scanning tools are designed to provide developers with actionable insights by executing only the security rules that have been defined as actionable. This focused approach reduces the volume of alerts and filters out noise, allowing developers to concentrate on the most critical issues. Instead of being overwhelmed by a multitude of warnings, developers can prioritize their efforts on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the security remediation process.

Elasticity

Code scanning tools built on the open SARIF standard offer a high degree of flexibility and extensibility. They can incorporate both open-source and commercial SAST solutions within a unified cloud-native framework. Additionally, these tools can integrate with third-party scanning engines, enabling organizations to aggregate results from multiple security tools into a single interface. This consolidated view simplifies the management and analysis of vulnerabilities across the development pipeline, allowing for more streamlined security operations and better decision-making.

Improved Security Posture

By detecting vulnerabilities in internal code, third-party components, and cloud infrastructure, code scanning helps organizations strengthen their overall security posture. Promptly addressing these vulnerabilities ensures that potential entry points for attackers are closed, reducing the risk of security incidents. This proactive approach to security enables organizations to stay ahead of emerging threats and maintain the integrity and reliability of their software products in an increasingly complex and dynamic threat landscape.

The Challenges of Code Scanning

• False Positives and Negatives: Code scanning tools may identify vulnerabilities that do not actually exist (false positives) or fail to detect real vulnerabilities (false negatives). These issues can reduce the efficiency of the scanning process. 
• Tool Integration Complexity: Integrating code scanning tools into existing development pipelines and environments may require significant effort and resources. Compatibility issues between tools can also arise. 
• Resource Requirements: Code scanning consumes computational resources and time, especially for large-scale projects. Balancing scanning frequency and resource utilization is a challenge. 
• Skill Requirements: Effective use of code scanning tools demands developers and security personnel to possess relevant knowledge and skills. A lack of expertise may affect the accuracy and effectiveness of scanning results.

What Vulnerabilities Can Code Scanning Detect?

• SQL Injection: By identifying input sanitization failures and software design flaws that allow users to directly input SQL queries into input fields without proper sanitization. 
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): By detecting improper input validation or insecure system tokens that enable hackers to exploit a target system's trust in returning users. 
• Remote Code Execution (RCE): By identifying misconfigurations or inadequate validation mechanisms that allow attackers to execute arbitrary code remotely. 
• Buffer Overflows: By detecting misconfigurations that permit input data exceeding a buffer's capacity to be sent to it. 
• Hard-Coded Secrets: By scanning for high-entropy patterns or known indicators of secrets, such as API tokens or administrator passwords, within code.

Conclusion

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, secure code scanning has become a cornerstone of modern software development. It empowers organizations to proactively identify and remediate code vulnerabilities and quality issues, thereby significantly reducing the likelihood of security breaches and enhancing the overall robustness of software products. By seamlessly integrating code scanning into the SDLC, development teams can strike a crucial balance between rapid delivery and uncompromising security. This integration not only helps in delivering secure and reliable software that meets market demands but also safeguards user interests and builds trust. Moreover, with the right tools and strategies, code scanning can evolve alongside an organization's growth, continuously adapting to new challenges and threats, and ensuring that security remains a fundamental aspect of every line of code committed.