Pragmatic Application Security
Thoughts on Secure Software Development
In modern software development, there is a strong emphasis on aspects like speed and productivity. At first glance, this may appear to contradict a mechanism like a security gate, which, by definition, interrupts the process. At first glance, this may contradict in contrast to a mechanism like a security gate. That’s why many seem to … Read more
As someone who has been working with IAST long before it was actually called this way – Fortify released its Program Trace Analyzer (PTA) approximately in the year 2008 – I have followed the evolution of this technology closely and posted a couple of times on it as well. For me, IAST was always not … Read more
Tools that test code for common vulnerabilities such as OWASP Top Ten fall today in three categories of AST (Application Security Testing) tools: SAST (static code scanning), DAST (dynamic app scan), and IAST (dynamic code scanning). Consequently, there are not a few but a lot of tools, especially in SAST and DAST areas, both commercial … Read more
Agile software development has gotten more and more attention in the last couple of years. Not only internet startups or media agencies but also large companies from conservative business lines like automotive, banking, insurance, and the public sector are more and more adjusting to the agile world. Since those companies are often already very much … Read more
When it comes to integrating application security into an (especially large) organization, we often experience a bunch of practical problems and frustration. In the end, a lot of money may have been spent, but little or no improvement to the security of developed applications has been accomplished. The main problem that organizations made is that … Read more
I’m often asked how security tests can be automated with non-commercial tools, e.g. triggered by a Jenkins build. Therefore I decided to write this post, to give you a bit of understanding which tools you can use and what you have to do in order to accomplish this goal. To not over complicate this, I … Read more
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools such as Fortify, Veracode, Checkmarx, or IBM App Scan Source Edition have been available on the market now for a while. All of them have their specific pros and cons. But there are certain problems that leak all of these static scanning technologies. Here are three important ones: False … Read more
One publication that usually became a lot of attention in the application security market is of course Gartner’s magic quadrant. A new one for Application Security Testing (that is confusingly abbreviated with “AST”, a term that in software anylysis usually stands for Abstract Syntax Tree). A couple of years ago, Gartner created two new quadrants … Read more
In part 1 of this series, I described how we can automatically test if a correct security header is a simple JUnit test. In this part, I will demonstrate how we can use self-made test automation to test even vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). XSS is doubtless one of the most common vulnerabilities for … Read more
Today, performing unit tests has become a standard in many development teams for automatically performing various tests on code (e.g. as a compulsory part of the build process). Especially in agile development, the existence, completeness and quality of such tests is a critical aspect for ensuring that the application is still working after each commited … Read more