Expanding AppSec Coverage with PII Leak Detection with Checkmarx + HoundDog.ai

Author: David Dewaele & Amjad Afanah (HoundDog.ai)

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, PII accounted for 46% of all compromised data in 2024, making it a prime target for attackers. While AppSec teams focus on securing code vulnerabilities, they often lack visibility into sensitive data flows. Meanwhile, Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools operate reactively, relying on production data instead of actively addressing security risks at the code level.

This disconnect creates major security gaps:

• AppSec teams often lack visibility when PII is logged, stored in files, or shared with third-party integrations, making it difficult to ensure these practices align with organizational policies and compliance requirements. 
• Data Security teams detect PII exposure only after data collection in production, making remediation costly and complex.

Here’s where Checkmarx integrated HoundDog.ai’s solution comes in.
Checkmarx’ Bring Your Own Results (BYOR) feature enables seamless integration of HoundDog.ai’s PII leak detection into Checkmarx One, enriching its Application Risk Management dashboard with critical insights into PII, PHI, and CHD exposure risks.

PII Protection, Built Seamlessly into Your ASPM

By leveraging Checkmarx’s Application Security Posture Management (ASPM), AppSec teams gain actionable insights, aggregated risk scores, and prioritized vulnerabilities based on exploitability in a business context.
Its open architecture sets it apart from other ASPM solutions, allowing specialized vendors to integrate effortlessly and bring in results from other security tools. That is how HoundDog.ai’s BYOR feature enables both CLI and API integrations in under two months.
This integration bridges the gap between AppSec and Data Security, helping organizations:

This integration bridges the gap between AppSec and Data Security, helping organizations:

• Enhance AppSec with PII Leak Detection by extending coverage to include PII leaks that are hard to remediate if found in production.
• Centralize Visibility by identifying PII exposure risks alongside existing SAST findings.
• Automate Compliance by proactively reducing risk and enforcing data protection policies before production.

By combining Checkmarx SAST with HoundDog.ai’s best-in-class PII detection, organizations can adopt a privacy-first security approach, minimizing remediation costs, strengthening their overall security posture, and ensuring sensitive data remains protected.

Scope of Integration

• CLI – Use Checkmarx’ cx command-line tool to import SARIF output files from the HoundDog.ai code scanner into Checkmarx One.
• API – Register your Checkmarx API key in HoundDog.ai’s cloud platform, map scanned repositories to corresponding projects in Checkmarx One, and watch scan results automatically populate in the Application Risk Management dashboard. See interactive demo.

HoundDog.ai Provides Unmatched PII Leak Detection

HoundDog.ai is designed to prevent unintentional developer errors, such as overlogging or oversharing sensitive data, before code is pushed to production. While SAST tools primarily focus on code vulnerabilities, HoundDog.ai specializes in detecting the exposure of PII, PHI, and CHD within logs, files, cookies, and tokens.
Additionally, it tracks data flows to third-party integrations, ensuring compliance with data processing agreements (DPAs) before violations become production issues.

Get a full view of HoundDog.AI’s insights from within Checkmarx One’s Unified ASPM Dashaboard

With Checkmarx One’s ASPM, you can get full visibility and insights into:

• 🔍 Early PII Leak Detection: Expands Checkmarx’ “Privacy Violations” detection with comprehensive coverage of PII, PHI, and CHD exposure across logs, files, cookies, tokens, and third-party integrations—before code is pushed to production.
• 🔗 Data Flow Tracking & Automated Reporting: Tracks sensitive data flows at the speed of development, generates RoPA reports and data flow diagrams, and ensures DPA and policy compliance before deployment—preventing data oversharing with third party integrations.
• 🛡 Privacy-by-Design: Integrates PII detection early in the SDLC, reducing remediation costs.
• ⚡ Proactive Risk Reduction: Minimizes PII exposure footprint, aligning with an “Assume Breach” security model.

The following table lists data sinks covered by HoundDog.AI’s integration.

PII leak findings are automatically pushed to Checkmarx’s Application Risk Management dashboard, providing a unified view of all application issues.

Why Choose a Best-of-Breed PII Leak Detection and Data Mapping Solution?

PII Leak Prevention Across All Stages of Development

HoundDog.ai static code scanner enables PII leak prevention at every stage of development. It begins with IDE plug-ins that highlight PII leaks as developers write code, include Managed Scans for customers who want to offload daily or weekly scans of their code repositories, and finally integrates with CI/CD pipelines for final checks before deployment.

Embedding Compliance Early in the SDLC

For privacy and compliance teams managing GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and FedRAMP, HoundDog.ai tracks sensitive data flows at the speed of development, generates RoPA reports, detects PII, PHI, and CHD leaks in logs, files, and risky mediums, and ensures third-party data flows comply with organizational policies before deployment.
Embedding compliance early in the SDLC enables a shift-left approach, eliminating error-prone manual data flow tracking via emails and spreadsheets. This keeps data maps accurate and reduces unnoticed PII leaks and data processing agreement (DPA) violations.

Unmatched Coverage

Effective detection requires three layers: data elements, data sinks, and sanitization. Over the past year, HoundDog.ai expanded coverage across all three:

• Comprehensive patterns for sensitive data elements, covering all critical PII, PIFI, PHI, and CHD.
• Hundreds of patterns for data sinks and third-party integrations.
• Predefined sanitization functions to prevent flagging sensitive data exposure if it was properly sanitized beforehand.

Extensibility

Teams can easily customize detection by adding their own RegEx patterns to fine-tune coverage for their environment.

AI-Powered Future

In Q2-2025, HoundDog.ai will launch a game-changing AI workflow that can be fully deployed in your environment, integrating with any LLM model in your cloud. This will enhance detection across data elements, data sinks, and sanitization functions, reducing the need for manual RegEx tuning. This optional feature streamlines compliance workflows and adds another benefit to an already powerful tool.

Conclusion

The HoundDog.ai integration with Checkmarx closes the gap between AppSec and PII. By ingesting PII leak findings, organizations can:

• Expand vulnerability coverage to detect PII leaks that are difficult to remediate if found in production.
• Strengthen collaboration between AppSec and Data Security teams.
• And adopt a privacy-first security approach, reducing remediation costs and enhancing security posture.

With Checkmarx and HoundDog.ai, organizations can proactively protect sensitive data and minimize security risks before they escalate. Request a demo today!