Modern application security is an essential element of contemporary software development. The SAST capbilities of Checkmarx-type platforms have been used for years to help companies identify vulnerabilities directly in their source code; however, many teams are now evaluating new platform options that offer broader security coverage, improved automation, and more user-friendly workflows for developers.
In addition, as development environments continue to be more cloud-based and driven by DevSecOps methodologies, teams will increasingly desire and use tools that can be easily integrated into their CI/CD pipeline and provide meaningful security information without excessive false positive alerts.
Below are a number of current platform options that organizations are using as alternatives.
What Modern Teams Expect from AppSec Platforms
The primary goal of all development teams today is to find tools that can enable both speed of development and security. Most modern appsec platforms will generally provide the following features:
- Early identification of vulnerabilities: Security issues identified during development.
- Integration into CI/CD pipelines: Automation of the security testing within the development pipelines.
- Fewer false alarms: Focus on identifying high-risk vulnerabilities.
- Greater breadth of security analysis: Examination of code, dependencies, and infrastructure.
Aikido Security
Aikido Security provides an integrated application security testing solution for developers to find vulnerabilities in applications throughout the application layer.
Unlike many other application security platforms that rely solely upon static analysis, Aikido uses a combination of tests to identify vulnerabilities in the source code, dependencies, containerized workloads, cloud environment, and infrastructure as a whole from a central console.
Key Features
- Static Code Analysis Description: Find vulnerabilities in your source code.
- Prioritization using AI: Description: The platform identifies and highlights the most dangerous security vulnerabilities and reduces false positives.
- Dependency Scanning Description: Identify vulnerabilities in Open Source Packages.
- Cloud and Container Security Description: Find vulnerabilities in Cloud Environments and Containerized Workloads.
- Infrastructure as Code Scanning Description: Find configuration risks before deployment.
Additional Benefits
- Integration with CI/CD Description: Automatically run security checks as part of your DevOps pipeline.
- Remediation Guidance for Developers Description: Provide easy-to-follow instructions for developers to quickly fix identified vulnerabilities.
- Security Dashboard Description: View all identified vulnerabilities across all projects and teams in one place.
Teams use Aikido because it integrates all of its security features into one platform to allow development teams to simplify their security toolsets and still deliver applications at high velocity.
Snyk
Snyk provides a developer-first security approach to help teams identify and remediate risk in applications, open-source dependencies, containers, and cloud environments.
Key Features
- Dependency Scanning: Identifies vulnerabilities within open-source libraries that are being used by your application.
- Code Security Testing: Identifies vulnerabilities in your application’s source code.
- Container Scanning: Scans container images for potential risks.
- CI/CD Integration: Allows you to automate security tests as part of your development pipeline.
- Infrastructure-as-Code analysis: Detect configuration issues in cloud environments.
- Automated remediation suggestions: Provide recommendations for fixing vulnerabilities.
Snyk allows teams to integrate security checks into their existing tool sets and helps teams find and fix vulnerabilities earlier in the development process.
Semgrep
Semgrep is an easy-to-use and highly adaptable tool for finding bugs in your code with speed.
Key Features
- Custom rules engine: Create tailored security checks for code.
- Fast scanning: Analyze repositories quickly during development.
- CI/CD integration: Run security checks in DevOps pipelines.
- Developer-friendly reports: Provide clear vulnerability insights.
- Rule library: Use prebuilt security rules for common vulnerabilities.
- IDE integrations: Identify issues directly inside developer environments.
Teams that are looking for rapid, flexible static analysis that can be integrated into current workflows use Semgrep.
Veracode
Veracode is a company that specializes in providing cloud-based application security testing to companies that need scalable, automated application vulnerability identification and compliance assistance.
Key Features
- SAST, Description: Scan code for vulnerabilities.
- Security Policy Management: Manage compliance and security standards.
- Automated Testing: Integrate scanning into the CI/CD pipeline.
- Developer Guidance: Guide developers on how to remediate vulnerabilities found by scanners.
- Software composition analysis: Detect vulnerabilities in third-party components.
- Security analytics dashboard: Track vulnerability trends across applications.
Teams choose Veracode because it provides them with enterprise-class security functionality with the ability to scale using cloud technology.
Final Thoughts
Modern application security is developing at an incredible rate. Application security can no longer be based solely on one testing method; instead, it now incorporates many testing methods to give the user an overall view of their applications’ vulnerabilities.
Using modern application security platforms has several benefits for teams that adopt them:
- Vulnerabilities are identified earlier in the development process.
- The number of alerts received by teams is reduced.
- The new platforms also make it easier to use in a DevSecOps workflow.
Choosing the right application security platform will become increasingly important as our development environments continue to grow and change.
Explore these modern AppSec platforms to better align your organization’s security strategy to support faster and more secure software development.
