State of Application Security

The last year had been an interesting one for information security with a number of different studies and media coverage on (web) application security. So it’s worth looking a bit closer at that data. I will try to put these statistics a little bit into perspective. There are some Gartner quotes related to attacks on … Read more

Agile Security & SecDevOps Touch Points

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

Create your own Web Security Standard in 60 Minutes

Security requirements for Web applications are vital because they are specifying what a team (e.g. a development team) has actually to do and what not. Many companies are however struggling with implementing such requirements for Web-based applications, at least consisting ones on an organizational level. There are many reasons for that: complexity, lack of know-how, … Read more

An Organizational View on Application Security

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

IAST: A New Approach for Agile Security Testing

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

Additional Object Security with UUIDs

One of the most critical vulnerabilities a Web application can have is an insecure direct object reference. Such vulnerability normaly exists due to an (usually database) object id that an user can directly access and manipulate (and!) that is not authorized correctly. An example that we often see is something like this: http(s)://www.example.com?id=123 or within … Read more

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing 2014

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