The Problem: Picking an AppSec Tool Devs Will Use
If you’re responsible for provisioning developer tools – your job is hard. Developers need a lot of stuff, all of which needs to integrate properly, to be successful. And in their case, success is designing quality software and delivering it on time. Much of the business world is increasingly focusing on and revolving around developers; and most everyone expects more and more out of them.
In the past 5 years, that “more” has grown to encompass application security.
This means even more steps added to developer workflows. And it also means working with security teams, who come to the table with a very different mindset and set of incentives.
For this to have any chance of working, in addition to making the necessary cultural changes to shift to a DevSecOps mindset, you also need a tool that devs will actually use. And as we know – developers are very choosey about their tools.
So here you are. You’re not in AppSec, and maybe you’ve never worked in security at all! But you have to help make the choice of what AppSec tools to use. That’s a tough spot. Here is some guidance.
End the Guesswork – Give Devs the Tools and Info They Need to Fix Vulnerabilities Fast
“Developers haven’t learned secure coding!” is a common lament from InfoSec teams. And yeah – it’s true. They haven’t. Is it their fault? Nope. Can we do a better job of educating them? Surely! But in the meantime, when a developer gets assigned a vulnerability… say… TODAY. RIGHT NOW. What tools and information can your AppSec vendor provide them with so they don’t spend 3 hours researching a fix? How can we make it as easy as possible for them?
At Checkmarx we tell you which issues to fix, where they are, and how developers can fix them – fast. In addition to having a powerful back end that takes care of scans, correlation and prioritization, we provide a seamless developer experience with features to make devs’ work go faster. This includes:
- Best-Fix Location (BFL): BFL automatically guides developers to the line of code from which to best fix a vulnerability. Using BFL often results in resolving multiple vulnerabilities with one action, saving developers time and effort.
- AI Secure Coding Assistant: Checkmarx’ AI Secure Coding Assistant plugs directly into the IDE and enables developers to identify secure coding best practice violations in the file that they are working on as they code. With in-line scanning and remediation suggestions, developers can stay in workflow and resolve vulnerabilities quickly.
- Auto-Remediation: Checkmarx gives developers AI-generated code snippets as suggestions to fix specific vulnerabilities in-line as they are written. This is an excellent complement to Checkmarx Guided Remediation, which provides developers with AI-generated assistance, suggestions, explanations, and other guidance in human-readable language.
- In-Depth Remediation Guidance and Codebashing: Within a dev’s IDE, Checkmarx provides detailed information about each specific vulnerability, how it’s exploited, and devs can best fix it. We also provide links directly from the IDE to the relevant training within our Codebashing secure coding training course.
Let Your Devs Work
What does that mean? Security tasks are easier for developers to complete when they’re built directly into developers’ existing workflows, meaning integrations and productivity tools!
The tool you purchase must integrate seamlessly with IDEs, SCMs, feedback/bug tracking/alerting tools and systems, and CI/CD pipeline tools. Plug-ins should be easy for developers to download and securely access where appropriate, and the tool should be easily accessible via webhooks and CLI tools depending on how your devs like to operate. In addition to integrations, it also means having security tools specifically for developers to complete security tasks more quickly. This includes AI secure coding assistants, easy-access security educational tools, and a suite of security automations.
Checkmarx has everything you need to bring security into your developers’ tools and workflows. We do this with a full suite of integrations and developer tools aimed at raising your team’s DevSecOps maturity including:
- IDE Integrations including VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio and Eclipse.
- SCM Integrations including GitHub Cloud, GitLab Cloud, Bitbucket Cloud, Azure DevOps Cloud, and more.
- Bug Tracking and Alerting Integrations including Jira, GitHub Issue, Azure DevOps Bug Board, Slack, Teams, email, and more.
- CI/CD Integrations (via plug-in or CLI) including Jenkins, Team City, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Maven, Bitbucket Pipelines, CircleCI, GitLab, Bamboo and CodeBuild.
- AI Secure Coding Assistant (see above)
Make It All Work Together!
What does that mean? If you’re in DevOps, platform engineering, product security, or a similar discipline within the development team, then you are probably dealing with lots of developers, working with lots of tools, and many, many pipelines. We recommend a unified AppSec platform to help you manage complex enterprise-scale development pipelines, as well as provide continuous and automated security at scale. This would mean a single point for all your AppSec integrations, allowing you to deploy and provision your developers with security tools more easily. The right platform will seamlessly integrate security controls throughout your SDLC, minimizing the impact of vulnerability scans that slow developers down and speeding up AppSec to work at the speed of development.
At Checkmarx we make it all work with the speed and integrations you need to secure all your development pipelines. We do this with:
- Dynamic Engines: Checkmarx gives you the power to optimize resource usage with dynamic engine allocation, management, and deallocation in containerized environments, cutting the costs associated with slow preconfigured engines by 25-50%. More importantly to developers, it allows them to kick off a scan whenever they need to, so pipelines don’t get caught in a queue waiting for another scan to complete.
- Flexible and Early Scanning: Checkmarx offers both in-depth security (to find maximum risk) and fast scanning (to cover every application with minimum overhead and noise). Developers can choose the most appropriate configuration for each application based on that application’s requirements. Checkmarx One also integrates directly with the repo to scan uncompiled code as early as check-in; and also allows devs to kick off scans directly from a pull request.
- Integrations all across the SDLC: Checkmarx One is a unified AppSec platform, providing access to a full range of AppSec tools that integrate at every step of the SDLC. This allows you to set security controls where and when you need them and optimize your developers’ workflow.
Key Principles for AppSec Tools
Driving developer adoption of AppSec tools is a persistent challenge. Traditional tools often fail to deliver actionable insights, disrupt workflows, and fall over when trying to deliver value to developers at scale.
The solution lies in finding a tool that manifests these three key principles: Ending the guesswork by giving developers the tools and information they need to fix vulnerabilities fast. Letting developers work by embedding security directly into their existing tools and workflows, from IDEs to CI/CD pipelines, and enabling faster remediation and reducing context-switching. Finally, making it all work together by consolidating AppSec tools into a unified platform that provides full visibility across the SDLC, minimizing costs and tool sprawl enabling AppSec to move at the speed of development.
At Checkmarx, we have everything you need to provide developers with security tools they will actually use, while still giving your AppSec teams the power and reliability they need. If you’d like to learn more about Checkmarx, click here to schedule a demo!
Like your developers, at Checkmarx we’re always ready to run.