APPSEC
Implementing SAST Security Policies: Effective Strategies for Application Protection
October 10, 2024
Implementing SAST is crucial for securing code early in the development process. This blog explores strategies for implementing SAST policies for optimizing security and minimizing noise. Arnica’s pipelineless approach provides real-time, automated scanning directly within Source Code Management systems, ensuring 100% code coverage without manual effort. This method enhances compliance with security standards, prioritizes actionable insights for developers, and scales effortlessly with development, offering an efficient and cost-effective solution for modern application security.
Many organizations need to comply with strict security standards such as ISO 27001, GDPR and SOC2. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) helps adhere to these standards by detecting vulnerabilities early in the development cycle and enforcing secure coding practices. Embedding SAST as part of automated code scans ensures continuous compliance and reduces the risk of breaches and fines. Early detection of these risks allows companies to adhere to and maintain regulatory compliance without impacting development velocity or compromising on code security and quality.
Arnica’s pipelineless approach provides immediate visibility into security risks, with every line of code scanned in real-time, which allows developers to address vulnerabilities as they arise, and before they are merged into production. This real-time detection is vital for staying ahead of zero-day vulnerabilities and new attack vectors that target code weaknesses.
In the software development environment, where threats are constantly evolving, SAST helps ensure that applications are built securely from the ground up, reducing the risk of breaches and costly remediation efforts later.
Arnica simplifies and accelerates security efforts by integrating directly into Source Code Management systems – such as GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and BitBucket – as well as ChatOps, and ticketing platforms. This allows for automatic, real-time scanning of code at the moment it is introduced into a feature branch. This approach is inherently scalable, as not only does it avoid the complexity and overhead associated with pipeline-based scanning, it is also providing real-time detection and 100% coverage, without any exceptions.
As development teams grow and the volume of code increases, this seamless approach ensures that every line of code, for every single developer is scanned, even for new repositories. This happens without any additional manual efforts such as configuring new pipeline integrations with the help of the DevOps team, deploying and maintaining IDE plugins, or learning how to use a new tool. With SAST tools for code scanning, Arnica offers a real-time, automated solution that allows security to scale with development, providing comprehensive protection without the bottlenecks or limitations of traditional pipeline-based or IDE-based tools.
Traditional SAST solutions often fall short when it comes to providing timely and actionable insights for developers. Typically integrated into CI/CD pipelines, these tools tend to generate results late in the development process, making vulnerabilities harder and more expensive to fix. Additionally, the insights provided are often too generic or inaccurate, lacking the context developers need to make quick and effective code changes. This not only delays remediation but also impacts development velocity, creating friction between development and security teams.
Arnica uses AI-driven SAST risk mitigation to deliver actionable insights directly into the developer’s daily workflow, leveraging the existing tech stack: ChatOps, ticketing systems, and AI. By providing immediate, actionable insights right at the point of code commit, developers receive context-specific recommendations and code fixes as soon as vulnerabilities are detected, without involving AppSec teams. This approach helps streamline the process by facilitating bi-directional real-time interactions via ChatOps, automatically opening and closing tickets for findings, giving kudos to developers that remediated findings before merging to production, and using AI to suggest and explain code fixes upon request.
This approach fosters a security-conscious culture, where not only developers are being encouraged and enabled to write secure code, they’re also socially recognized upon remediating risks early before merged into production. It also offloads application security teams, eliminates the friction between, and boosts productivity while ensuring that applications are secure from the ground up.
To effectively leverage SAST security techniques, organizations must establish clear security policies, standards, and procedures tailored to their specific risk appetite. Policies set the overall security objectives, while standards provide specific requirements aligned with frameworks like OWASP Top 10, NIST CSF, and CIS Controls. Procedures outline the steps for scanning code, triaging vulnerabilities, and remediation.
A critical part of this process is determining what constitutes an acceptable risk. This is something unique to your organization. For example, your organization may mandate that critical vulnerabilities must be fixed within 14 days, and cannot be dismissed, while high severity vulnerabilities can be dismissed with proper justification. By defining these parameters across the board, organizations can ensure that code scanning is applied consistently and effectively, with clear guidelines that help development and AppSec teams detect, prioritize and address security risks leveraging the right people, in the right context, at the right time
Choosing the right SAST tools is crucial to successfully integrating security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Organizations must consider several factors when selecting a tool, some of the obvious ones are:
Arnica’s innovative approach also provides the ability to prioritize the most important risks based on historical organizational behavior and repository importance, automatic assignment of owners to each product and / or code repository based on user behavior and engagement, as well as empower developers to own risk mitigation by directly providing critical information and direction to solve their issues.
Once a tool is selected, configuring and fine-tuning the tool to align with the organization’s methodologies, security policies and risk appetite is critical. This includes setting up custom rules to detect specific vulnerabilities, defining thresholds for acceptable risks (e.g., failing builds for high and critical vulnerabilities), and integrating with tools like ChatOps, ticketing systems and LLMs. Proper configuration ensures that the SAST tool delivers actionable insights where and when developers need them, enabling efficient remediation and fostering a proactive approach to security.
Integrating a SAST tool into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is essential for identifying and addressing vulnerabilities early, but traditional methods often face significant challenges. An entire blog could (and has) been written on the topic of IDE plugins vs. CI/CD vs. a pipelineless approach to application security testing. IDE plugins, for instance, generate a lot of noise and therefore impact development velocity. Since IDE plugins are “opt-in / opt-out”, typically less than 20% of developers actually use them. This low adoption rate limits the effectiveness of the SAST tool, as many vulnerabilities may not be detected until later stages, if at all.
Status checks, which occur after code is written, provide feedback too late in the process, leading to costly and disruptive remediation. Pipeline integrations, while effective, demand substantial effort from DevOps teams for setup and ongoing maintenance, creating unnecessary efforts and introducing additional complexity.
A more efficient approach is to integrate your SAST tool directly into your source code management system with a pipelineless approach. This provides continuous, real-time feedback as code is pushed, ensuring vulnerabilities are detected and addressed immediately, without relying on manual efforts for new pipelines, or just complex pipeline configurations. By embedding SAST into the developer’s workflow, scanning each single line of code without exceptions, organizations can improve coverage, streamline remediation, and uphold a higher standard of security throughout the development lifecycle.
Effective prioritization of vulnerabilities in SAST is crucial to ensure that development and security teams focus on the most critical issues that pose the highest risk. With limited time and resources, teams must concentrate on vulnerabilities that could lead to significant impacts. Prioritization should align with the organization’s risk appetite—such as fixing all critical vulnerabilities within 14 days—to maintain compliance and strengthen security posture. Leveraging frameworks like the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), and Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog can further enhance prioritization. EPSS helps predict the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited, while KEV provides insights into vulnerabilities that are actively exploited in the wild. By integrating these data points, teams can gain better context, filter out noise, and focus on vulnerabilities that truly matter, improving remediation efficiency and reducing risk.
Integrating SAST tools into CI/CD pipelines can hinder development speed due to the time-intensive nature of security scans, particularly with large codebases, causing delays and tension between development and security teams. While IDE plugins offer an alternative, their "opt-in" nature means that typically fewer than 20% of developers use them, resulting in minimal coverage. Setting up and maintaining SAST in pipelines also demands considerable effort from DevOps, adding overhead and diverting resources from other priorities.
Moreover, feedback from pipeline-based SAST scans often arrives late in the development cycle—after code is written and committed—leading to longer remediation times and potentially delaying releases. There’s also the problem of "alert fatigue," where excessive findings, including false positives, overwhelm developers and diminish the security process's effectiveness. To overcome these challenges, a different approach is required in order to ensure effective risk mitigation throughout the software development life cycle.
The "shift left" movement aimed to integrate security earlier in the development process, but instead of introducing more automation and effective mitigation, it often shifted more work and effort onto developers. Rather than simplifying security through automation, developers often face increased complexity and responsibility from security tooling. To truly realize the intended vision of the shift left approach, organizations should focus on enhancing security with additional context, automation, streamlined communications, and efficient ticket management to unburden developers. This ensures that developers are supported with effective tools and processes, delivering the right fix, at the right time.
Arnica’s pipelineless security solution redefines application security by addressing the limitations of traditional AppSec methods. This innovative approach offers significant improvements in real-time visibility, 100% code coverage, seamless integrations with Source Code Management Systems (SCMs), ChatOps and ticketing platforms, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, making it ideal for modern development environments.
Unlike traditional IDE plugins that frustrate developers and often having them opt out—resulting in stunted adoption rates (studies show IDE usage can be as low as 20%)—Arnica offers comprehensive coverage by scanning every line of code the moment it's committed to your repository (as well as full code scans daily). With its seamless integration into source code management systems via webhooks, Arnica ensures that no code goes unscanned, risks are being remediated before making it to production—making it an integral part of your development workflow.
Unlike conventional methods that rely on periodic scans through pipelines, our approach performs real-time scanning as soon as code is committed. With our real-time security alerts, Risks are promptly identified and communicated directly, to developers with actionable remediation steps, fostering a blameless and supportive environment where secure coding takes precedence over merely accelerating release cycles. This immediate feedback loop eliminates the friction between R&D and AppSec teams while empowering developers to address vulnerabilities as they emerge, significantly reducing the workload for application security teams, while enhancing development velocity.
By embedding security into existing workflows through platforms like ChatOps and ticketing systems, our pipelineless approach eliminates the need for complex pipeline setups. This seamless integration automates code scanning and compliance, simplifying security processes and reducing manual effort for DevOps teams, while ensuring continuous protection without the overhead of managing multiple pipelines.
Arnica’s approach scales effortlessly with expanding codebases and development teams. It provides continuous, real-time coverage across all repositories, avoiding the complexity of traditional pipeline management. This ensures that security measures grow in tandem with development, maintaining efficiency without additional resources.
Developers receive immediate, actionable insights at the moment of code commit, accelerating remediation and seamlessly integrating security into their workflow. These insights are prioritized and enriched, enabling developers to take the right action at the right time. Additionally, Arnica provides context into product ownership leveraging user behavior and engagement—which creates clarity into who can actually assist remediating risks, while eliminating confusion and decreasing time to resolution. Developers can also leverage in-house LLMs to generate tailored risk mitigation suggestions. This approach fosters a proactive security culture by recognizing and encouraging developers who address vulnerabilities early—preventing them from reaching production and reducing friction between development and security teams.
The pipelineless approach reduces operational costs associated with traditional pipeline management. By streamlining security processes and automating common business operations such as ticket management, it provides a more cost-effective solution that simplifies application security while maintaining robust protection.
Arnica’s pipelineless approach offers a superior, efficient, and scalable solution to application security. It overcomes the shortcomings of traditional methods by integrating seamlessly into existing workflows, providing 100% coverage, real-time protection, and ensuring that security evolves alongside development.
Schedule time with the Arnica customer success team today to see for yourself!
