Code Security Scans: An Essential Part of Software Development

Are you a software developer concerned about the security of your code?

Do you want to ensure your software security from cyber-attacks and data breaches?

If so, you're in the right place.

I will tell you about code security scans and their crucial role in software development in this article.

You will also learn about the core benefits and a tool that can help you in code scanning quickly and efficiently.

What is a code security scan?

When you get health problems, the doctor recommends you go for an X-ray or CT scan to diagnose the disease.

Just like that, a code security scan is a process of finding vulnerabilities in your application.

The process includes automated tools like Codiga to check for potential breaches in source code.

It scans code for known security flaws and checks for insecure coding practices.

The scan's analysis results can help developers identify and fix security issues before they become a problem.

There are two main types of code security scans:

Static Code Analysis

It scans the code of an application without running it. You can identify security weaknesses such as:

• Code Injection: An attacker adds malicious code.
• Buffer Overflow: Input data exceeds the amount of allocated memory.
• SQL Injection: The hacker injects SQL code to execute unauthorized database queries.
• Access Control: When an application allows unauthorized access to sensitive data.

There is much more you can do with static code analysis.

It's a first step towards finding the possible threats inside your code base because it scans code during development and before moving the application to production.

Dynamic Code Analysis

The type of testing which occurs when your application is running. It can detect issues like:

• Misconfigurations: Improper configuration of an application that leads to vulnerable attacks.
• Insufficient logging and Monitoring: When monitoring for suspicious activities is disabled.
• Broken authentication: When an application does not check the identity of users. Hackers can pretend to be someone else or gain control of their accounts.
• Stress Failure: When your application cannot handle the stress (traffic, strength of users, and server outrage).

You can do more with dynamic code analysis.

It's a second step in finding the vulnerable issues in your code.

Since it doesn't have direct access to the code, it can highlight the problems where your application's code fails.

Core benefits of code security scans

You have learned about the types. Here are some core benefits which can help you understand further:

Improve Code Quality

The quality of source code matters a lot in software development.

It brings huge value in scalability, reliability, accuracy, maintainability, and usability.

If you are writing insecure code with bad standards or practices without knowing. Then, you need a way to detect coding issues inside your applications.

That is where automated code security scanners shine. You can easily improve the code without worrying about the breakage of secure coding practices.

Reduce the risk of vulnerabilities

Security scanners can identify potential weak points in your code, allowing you to take proactive steps to prevent attackers from exploiting them.

These tools inspect source code for errors, insecure coding practices, and suspicious patterns that could lead to potential vulnerabilities.

By finding these problems early in the development stage, you can remedy them before they become an issue.

Better Compliance Posture

It provides an automated way to ensure compliance with industry standards, such as PCI DSS, SOC-2, GDPR, and HIPAA.

Ultimately, It can help you to stay compliant with regulations and avoid costly penalties for non-compliance.

Increase Developer Efficiency

It can help developers by automatically scanning code for any possible security vulnerabilities and providing feedback on how to fix them.

It saves developers time and effort; they don't have to search their code to identify and address any issues manually.

Furthermore, some scanners can detect coding patterns that may be vulnerable to attack, which can help developers proactively prevent any potential threats before they arise.

Prioritization with severity

Scanning tools use a set of pre-defined rules to assign a priority level to each issue based on its severity and impact on the application.

For example, a critical vulnerability that could lead to a data breach or system compromise would be assigned a high priority score. In contrast, a minor coding error that does not affect the application's security will be considered a lower priority.

It helps organizations prioritize the tasks based on the issue severity.

How can Codiga help you run code security scans?

Codiga is helping developers to perform code security scans with ease.

It supports the best static analysis engine and is considered the fastest-growing SAST tool.

Several features make it a modern and advanced static analysis tool:

• A pre-defined set of rules to detect OWASP Top 10, SANS-CWE Top 25, and MITRE CWE.
• Create custom code analysis rules
• Works in your favorite IDEs like VS Code, JetBrains, and Visual Studio
• Supports multiple platforms: GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab
• Identify vulnerabilities in third-party packages or libraries.
• Get instant real-time feedback for quick deployments.
• Ease of integration within any CI/CD pipeline: GitHub Action, AWS CodeBuild, and Circle CI.
• Git Hooks support makes it easier to push code in repositories without worrying about security.

If you're serious about the security of your application, you should look into Codiga's static code analysis. Then, with ease of use, you can integrate it into your software development quickly.

Conclusion

Code security is a fundamental part of software development. With the ever-increasing risk of cyber-assaults, developers or security experts must prioritize safety during the development procedure.

Code security scans provide an approach to recognize and tackle possible security violations in source code before evil actors misuse them.

By incorporating these scans into the software engineering process, developers can be confident that their code meets the best security principles and limit the hazard of security violations.

FAQs

Who can run a security scan?

Anyone like software developers, network administrators, quality assurance teams, system administrators, and security experts can run it with the appropriate technical knowledge.

When should source code security scans be triggered?

It should trigger at various stages in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). For example, to ensure the security issues in the early stages, you can trigger it before pushing code to the git branches, during CI/CD pipelines, or before the software release.

0 mins read

Code scanning is one of the most foundational pieces of application development. When development teams scan their code for issues early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), they drastically reduce the number of risks, defects, and bugs that make it to production. Fixing code issues early in the SDLC is much less costly and time-consuming than running all security and quality tests right before production. 

In this article, we’ll cover the basics of code scanning, including:

What is code scanning?

Code scanning is a technique for analyzing code throughout the SDLC. Most commonly, developers use code scanning to identify vulnerabilities and/or errors throughout the development pipeline. Teams use various code-scanning methods to find issues in different parts of their applications. Often, they perform these techniques on a schedule or schedule them to kick off automatically when a developer performs a specific task.

When teams scan code for security issues and errors, they see several benefits, including: 

• Fewer errors and vulnerabilities in the application. By catching issues early in the SDLC, teams can ensure the application reaches production with minimal errors.

• Less work for developers later in the pipeline. Code scanning enables development teams to fix issues whenever they commit new code. Correcting problems while in development, versus weeks or months down the road, is much more efficient and cost-effective. 

• More robust security posture across the entire organization. Code vulnerabilities can create gaps in the organization’s whole security posture. If a single application contains security issues, all the networks and databases that interface with it could also be at risk. By fixing vulnerabilities as they happen, teams strengthen the overall security posture and facilitate security best practices outside of coding, such as secrets management.

Security code scanning techniques are essential to securing applications in today’s fast-paced development world. By catching vulnerabilities early in the development process, teams can minimize the number of security issues in production. Waiting until the end of the SDLC to fix all issues leaves teams with a tough choice: Do we release the application on time but with risks left unresolved, or do we work on mitigating risk but delay the release? 

Code scanning throughout the SDLC empowers teams to continue moving at the speed of DevOps without compromising security best practices.

Security code scanners can detect several types of security vulnerabilities within first-party source code, third-party components, and cloud infrastructure. They often flag security issues from the OWASP Top 10, such as SQL injection, insecure design, security misconfiguration, vulnerable and outdated components, and software and data integrity failures. 

Teams should use security code scanning techniques to find vulnerabilities across a varied development environment. Two of the most common methods include:

• Static application security testing (SAST). This scanning technique focuses on checking first-party code in real time. Often, teams set SAST code checks from tools such as Snyk Code to run automatically as soon as a developer performs a pull request.

• Interactive application security testing (IAST). IAST takes a “behind-the-scenes” look at an application’s functionality during the QA/testing stage. It monitors the application’s behaviour as an automated test or human tester interacts with it and then flags any security issues that arise from these interactions.

As your team considers code-scanning tools, keep an eye out for the following features: 

For language-specific tool recommendations, check out Snyk’s lists of top scanning tools for Java and Python. Snyk has code scanning coverage for all of the major languages, including Java, JavaScript and Python.

Successful code scanning requires strategic planning from the security and development teams. The following best practices can help you get started on your code-scanning journey:

1. Regularly schedule code scans. Your code scans should follow a consistent cadence, such as scanning every X number of days, making scans available to developers as they code,  etc. 

2. Integrate code scanning into the CI/CD pipeline. It’s helpful to integrate security code scans into your existing CI/CD practices. For example, some teams run SAST scans alongside unit tests during continuous integration.

3. Train developers on secure coding practices. By learning how to code securely, development teams can avoid creating vulnerabilities in the first place. Educate developers on their coding errors as soon as they happen to help them learn secure coding practices for the future. 

4. Use code scanning in tandem with manual code review. Teams should use automated code scanning and manual code reviews together. Manual code review allows developers to spot visible errors before running automated scans, possibly catching issues a code scanner couldn’t spot.

5. Address and prioritize the issues detected by code scanning. Knowing that your application contains code issues is just the first step. Next, your team must establish a plan for triaging and fixing issues. It helps to use a code scanner that can provide actionable remediation steps. 

6. Complement security code scanning with other application security best practices. Teams should also leverage software composition analysis (SCA), which finds and fixes vulnerabilities and licensing issues in third-party components such as open source code and container base images, and dynamic application security testing (DAST), which tests the applications in production by simulating front-end attacks.

Snyk offers a developer-first experience for code scanning. We designed our SAST product, Snyk Code, to offer fix suggestions as developers write code in their IDE or CLI. Snyk Code can also plug into your CI/CD pipeline to scan pull requests as they happen. This proactive approach prevents team members from merging vulnerable code into your codebase. 

Learn more about Snyk’s application security solution for securing your code throughout the development pipeline.