We’re thrilled to announce Checkmarx Application Security Posture Management (ASPM), dedicated to supporting enterprise companies in mitigating their most critical risks. Through ASPM, we empower organizations to prioritize and address vulnerabilities efficiently, giving them the insights they need to focus on fixing what’s most important while letting developers get back to business.
With Checkmarx One, we revolutionized how enterprises can approach security management. Gone are the days of simply collecting results and generating vulnerability reports. Our Application Risk Management feature offers a holistic view of your y aggregating data from multiple AppSec tools and providing a comprehensive risk score for each scanned application, so you can quickly see what needs to be prioritized. For more details, you can read our blog post on the announcement: https://checkmarx.com/blog/introducing-fusion-2-0-with-application-risk-management/ .
ASPM goes beyond risk assessment. It allows you to more fully develop risk profiles for your applications. With ASPM, we are introducing the ability to ingest AppSec results from other tools, via CLI and API, and correlate them within Checkmarx One, as well as new features around runtime insights via our newly announced Cloud Insights tools
By embracing ASPM with , organizations gain a clear understanding of their application risks and access a suite of tools designed to increase their security posture.
What is ASPM?
Application Security Posture Management (ASPM), serves as the vigilant guardian of your software applications, ensuring they are protected against the relentless onslaught of cyber threats.
At its core, ASPM is a comprehensive approach used by organizations to manage the security of their software applications throughout the development lifecycle.
The term “posture” refers to how ready and tough your applications are against potential problems. ASPM makes sure your applications stay strong like this all the time, ready to handle whatever might come your way.
Meanwhile, “management” talks to the ongoing orchestration of all your security measures. It involves careful planning, doing things right, and improving strategies to not just stop problems, but also make sure your defenses are always up to date against new risks.
ASPM incorporates various processes, tools, and strategies aimed at identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and mitigating security risks associated with applications. The goal is to ensure that applications are developed, deployed, and maintained with strong security measures in place to protect against potential threats and vulnerabilities,
Organizations face significant challenges that impact their ability to effectively manage security risks. These challenges include dealing with noise from numerous vulnerabilities flagged by disparate point solutions, struggling with the manual analysis and correlation of incompatible data sets, and experiencing prioritization paralysis due to limited resources and difficulty in identifying.
A major challenge is dealing with the overwhelming noise created by numerous vulnerabilities flagged by various security tools. For a large enterprise, any application security tool can generate thousands of vulnerabilities across hundreds or thousands of applications. Identifying which of these vulnerabilities are the most critical to fix can be daunting, as severity ratings alone don’t always provide enough context. Combine that with the use of multiple security tools, and you have a real mess on your hands. Most organizations rely on several AppSec tools, each producing its own set of vulnerabilities. These tools often lack integration, leading to different contexts and perspectives on the vulnerabilities they identify. This lack of cohesion can make it difficult to see the full picture and prioritize effectively.
The problem multiplies when trying to correlate the thousands of vulnerabilities identified by these different tools. Each tool may use its own format and criteria for identifying and reporting issues, making it a complex task to bring all this data together to get a holistic view. This lack of standardization can lead to major inefficiencies and missed vulnerabilities.
To make matters worse, different tools are often managed by different teams within the organization. This means that teams must collaborate across disparate datasets and tools to analyze and correlate the data. This cross-team coordination adds another layer of complexity, as each team may have its own processes and priorities. This makes it even harder to manage the security posture effectively.
Additionally, organizations struggle with prioritization paralysis due to limited resources and the difficulty of identifying which vulnerabilities should be addressed first. Communicating progress to the business and justifying resource allocation for security fixes pose significant obstacles. It can be challenging to explain the importance of specific security measures to stakeholders who may not have a technical background, and securing the necessary resources to address vulnerabilities promptly requires clear, persuasive communication.
By addressing these challenges, ASPM helps organizations streamline their security efforts, prioritize critical vulnerabilities, and enhance their overall security posture.
Why Checkmarx ASPM?
ASPM represents a shift from using separate security tools to a more proactive and unified approach. Instead of analyzing and managing vulnerabilities with different tools that don’t work together, ASPM brings everything into one integrated system
By consolidating various security processes and tools with ASPM, organizations gain a comprehensive understanding of their application risks. This holistic approach enables more effective risk management, as it allows teams to prioritize vulnerabilities based on their impact on the overall security posture (strategic alignment). Additionally, ASPM facilitates better collaboration between different teams involved in security, development, and operations, fostering a culture of shared responsibility and accountability (efficiency + resource optimization). Ultimately, this transition empowers organizations to proactively identify and mitigate security threats, leading to enhanced resilience and protection against cyberattacks (visibility + accountability).
ASPM leverages all of Checkmarx’s market-leading, native correlation features, such as exploitable path, along with the ability to ingest data via API from other solutions using industry-standard SARIF files. This comprehensive approach allows you to manage your entire application security posture seamlessly within Checkmarx One, consolidating both Checkmarx and any other solutions you may have. With a unified dashboard, correlation engine, risk management view, and workflow, you can efficiently analyze and triage vulnerabilities for remediation.
Bring Your Own Results
Bring Your Own Results (BYOR) is a powerful capability that enables organizations to enhance their application security posture by incorporating external vulnerability findings into their existing security ecosystem. This feature allows organizations to import vulnerability results from third-party security tools and services, regardless of their origin, as long as they adhere to a specific standard format – SARIF.
By bringing these external results into Checkmarx One, organizations can gain a comprehensive view of their application security landscape, identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities more effectively. These imported results are seamlessly integrated into the Application Risk Management feature, providing organizations with a unified view of their application risk profile and enabling them to make informed decisions to secure their end-to-end application lifecycle.
To enable the seamless integration of external vulnerability findings into their application security workflow, Checkmarx provides users with the ability to perform imports using Command-Line Interface (CLI) or Application Programming Interface (API), ensuring easy integration with their existing pipelines. By leveraging the SARIF format, organizations can effortlessly import and consolidate vulnerability results from diverse sources. Furthermore, our platform includes quality checks that validate SARIF files against standards, ensuring data integrity and consistency. To maintain performance and optimize resource utilization, we have implemented thresholds for the number of results and rules per import run as an example. These limits help prevent overload scenarios and ensure efficient processing of imported data, enhancing overall platform reliability and performance.
Cloud Insights
Today we are also introducing another new capability within Checkmarx One: Cloud Insights. We connect to AWS EKS directly to obtain clusters and container metadata, instead of relying solely on CNAPP vendors. By using AWS Network Access Analyzer, we determine if a container image is publicly exposed. This approach allows flexibility in using Wiz (or other CNAPP vendors), or directly accessing Cloud Service Providers (like AWS), and in the future, GCP and Azure, for runtime context. Cloud Insights leverages CNAPP vendors to store runtime container image metadata, enhancing Checkmarx One scanner results with runtime context. This integration provides users with comprehensive container runtime metadata and insights into public exposure, seamlessly enhancing their existing Checkmarx One projects.
By leveraging Cloud Insights users can effortlessly match container images from runtime to their corresponding Checkmarx One projects and source code repos. This intelligent matching process -automatically filters out projects and vulnerabilities that are not currently deployed in runtime, effectively reducing noise, and streamlining focus onto the most critical areas requiring remediation. Additionally, Cloud Insights provides visibility into the public exposure status of container images, enabling users to prioritize their remediation efforts with precision and efficiency.
Cloud Insights data further enriches your results in our application risk management feature, delivering a comprehensive view of your application security landscape. These insights are prominently displayed in our application risk management interface, featuring intuitive icons and robust filtering capabilities. Additionally, if you have runtime insights enabled in your application, Cloud Insights will prioritize filtering out those vulnerabilities first for swift resolution.
Correlation
Checkmarx ASPM takes advantage of and expands upon Checkmarx One’s industry-leading correlation capabilities. Correlation reduces the manual efforts involved in analyzing and comparing security data from various sources to more easily provide a comprehensive view of an organization’s application security posture. By correlating data from different security tools and sources, our ASPM solution can identify and prioritize vulnerabilities more effectively, helping you to manage your application security risks more efficiently.
An example of this is our exploitable path feature, which correlates findings between SAST and SCA to identify the vulnerabilities in open-source libraries that are in functions or methods called by your source code, and therefore exploitable in your application. A third party tested our exploitable path feature (Tolly report), and the results show that it’s easy for anybody to claim to have a feature like correlation, but there’s a difference between having it and doing it well (hint: we do it well).
Presenting these correlated insights within our application risk management feature offers stakeholders a concise summary of security posture. This integrated approach provides higher confidence, richer context, and aids in identifying false positives while reducing noise. By focusing on genuine vulnerabilities that pose real risks, security teams can streamline their efforts effectively.
Application Risk Management
As a central element of our ASPM framework, the Application Risk Management feature highligts the power of the integration of BYOR, CNAS, correlation and AST orchestration functionalities. This unified tool offers a holistic view of application security risks, tailored to align with the company’s business priorities. Users will be able to start with a comprehensive risk score for all their applications, so AppSec managers can see quickly what needs to be addressed first. With this solution, AppSec managers can efficiently manage and prioritize vulnerabilities by providing a centralized and consolidated view of security risks. This instantly removes the complexity that a disorganized risk management process can carry with it. Once AppSec managers can zero in on the riskiest applications, teams can point developers to critical vulnerabilities that need remediation.
This feature allows AppSec teams to truly prioritize and triage the most critical vulnerabilities on the riskiest applications. It allows us to create a better developer experience, since we now are giving clear signals as to where the highest impact areas are, instead of having them waste their time wading through the noise.
Explore the transformative capabilities of ASPM’s Application Risk Management feature.
Get started today
With features like BYOR, Cloud Insights and advanced correlation, Checkmarx One is empowering organizations to take a proactive stance in managing their application security risks. By consolidating these diverse functionalities into the Application Risk Management feature, we offer users a streamlined and intuitive interface to assess and prioritize security vulnerabilities effectively. As we continue to innovate and enhance our platform, we invite you to explore the boundless possibilities of Checkmarx One in safeguarding your digital assets and fortifying your application security posture.
Visit our website to learn more about how Checkmarx One can elevate your security strategy to new heights. Contact us today for a demo of Checkmarx ASPM.