Appdome has integrated its platform with GitHub to build, scale, and deliver software.
At its emotional core, Star Trek explores the bond between two very different species – Kirk and Spock – who team up to seek out new worlds and defend the Enterprise. In many ways, the same can be said for developers and security teams. How so? In Part 1 of this blog, we covered Clear Visualization and Teamwork. Here are 2 more ways.
3. Gamification
Resistance is futile when it comes to adopting gamification. Gamification is considered the buzz in today's enterprises and startups alike. Wikipedia has a good description: "Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems. Gamification is used in applications and processes to improve user engagement, return on investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning."
Gamification takes the teamwork enhancements described earlier to another level.
Gamification can be implemented as an exchange platform between developers, integrated into the developer's environments. In such a setup, each developer would be able to view the security solutions of others.
Developers could then flag particular solutions, similar to a Facebook "like", and even contribute to the general understanding of the nature of the particular vulnerability. Taking it further, it's even possible to reward the user who has been most beneficial to the team. For example, presenting rewards to developers who find the hidden risk, ways to break the code or written an impenetrable function. You can even call it your own in-house bug-bounty program.
A global social network is ideal for implementing such a security exchange platform. However, even simple existing forums, such as GitHub or StackExchange, can be used as they too reward developers for their contribution.
4. Immediate Feedback
"Kirk relied on Spock unfailingly for his advice, knowing it would never be encumbered by any thoughts of personal gain or tempered by emotional constraints," as stated by Time magazine.
The type of immediate feedback Spock is known for also has big benefit in a SAST scenario. We all draw lessons from our mistakes. Previously, a Quality Assessment (QA) was not performed until several months after the development cycle ends. Nowadays, in today's development environments, unit testing is de riguer and developers receive feedback on their code while it's still "fresh off the press".
Taking a look at SAST, we see that many companies employ the tools after the end of the development cycle, several months after the development of the code. Similar to QA processes, SAST should be integrated into the development and testing environments. While first-generation SAST tools provided an analysis too slow to fit into a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment environment, important functionality such as incremental analysis, seamless IDE integration and most importantly ease of use, solve this problem.
Live Long and Prosper
Application Security is built around the concept of ensuring that the code written for an application does what it was built to do, and keeps the contained data secure. Notwithstanding the high general interest in security, time and time again developers fail to integrate secure coding best practices. With these four tips, security teams can transfer that security spark to developers when it comes to writing code. In order for any security program to be properly implemented, it needs effective teamwork between developers and security teams.
Amit Ashbel is Director of Product Marketing & Cyber Security Evangelist at Checkmarx.
Industry News
DigiCert, announced a partnership with ReversingLabs to enhance software security by combining advanced binary analysis and threat detection from ReversingLabs with DigiCert's enterprise-grade secure code signing solution.
Semgrep announced that Semgrep Supply Chain is now free for all to use, up to a 10-contributor limit.
Checkmarx announced its new AI Query Builders and AI Guided Remediation to help development and AppSec teams more accurately discover and remediate application vulnerabilities.
Copado announced a technology partnership with nCino to provide financial institutions with proven tools for continuous integration, continuous delivery and automated testing of nCino features and functionality of the nCino cloud banking platform.
OpsMx announced extensions to OpsMx Intelligent Software Delivery (ISD) that make it a CI/CD solution designed for secure software delivery and deployment.
Couchbase announced a broad range of enhancements to its Database-as-a-Service Couchbase Capella™.
Remote.It release of Docker Network Jumpbox to enable zero trust container access for Remote.It users.
Platformatic launched a suite of new enterprise-grade products that can be self-hosted on-prem, in a private cloud, or on Platformatic’s managed cloud service:
Parasoft announced the release of C/C++test 2023.1 with complete support of MISRA C 2023 and MISRA C 2012 with Amendment 4.
Rezilion announced the release of its new Smart Fix feature in the Rezilion platform, which offers critical guidance so users can understand the most strategic, not just the most recent, upgrade to fix vulnerable components.
Zesty has partnered with skyPurple Cloud, the public cloud operations specialists for enterprises.
With Zesty, skyPurple Cloud's customers have already reduced their average monthly EC2 Linux On-Demand costs by 44% on AWS.
Red Hat announced Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain, a solution that enhances resilience to software supply chain vulnerabilities.
Mirantis announced Lens Control Center, to enable large businesses to centrally manage Lens Pro deployments by standardizing configurations, consolidating billing, and enabling control over outbound network connections for greater security.
Red Hat announced new capabilities for Red Hat OpenShift AI.