I recently did an extensive competitive analysis of SAST tools for a client. Anyone who is thinking about buying one of these tools should pay attention to what versions of each language they support. Also try to get old release notes in order to determine when they first supported a particular language version. Many vendors take a good long time to support new versions of languages, even mainstream ones like Java an…
The Infosec Apocalypse
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Re: The Infosec Apocalypse
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#14To me this is a non-issue, because customers almost always ask for types of security checks, not for specific tooling (ie: asking for source code analysis vs asking for veracode). As a rule, compliance/government folks will be concerned about the types of security measures you have in place and not about the specific implementation. Commercial source code analysis tools have varying support depending on language (as others have mentioned: some languages are harder than others). A very valid alternative is to use a linter with security checks (and potential custom rules). The advantage will be that checking will go much faster so you can do it more often (every PR instead of nightly for example). Many security conscious companies have something like this in place.
In general when you're answering security due diligence, it's your job to convince the customer you're going to keep their data safe. They will ask about certain things you don't have and it's your job to explain how you're still solving the underlying problem. Typical example: customers asking for antivirus on all systems and you using (immutable) docker containers.
By the way, the interesting thing here is not the answers to the questions, but how you organise your company to quickly and effectively (as in: no follow up meetings or worse: action plans) answer them. My pet peeve here is "customer guided security": You start from what you think you need (baseline) and you add the security measures that take the longest to explain why you don't have them. That way, you're skating through most of the due diligences and sales velocity goes up, which will make your bosses very happy.
Re: The Infosec Apocalypse
#15I don't think I've ever seen a company where the security tooling team had that kind of authority or pull. I've seen plenty where the first time the security team hears about a new technology is after product development has started.
You only have to look at the rise of containerization in enterprise to see this in action. When it started tooling was way behind, and it's only catching up now, but that didn't seem to stop anyone.
Re: The Infosec Apocalypse
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#18As if enterprises were not responsible for not properly budgeting security concerns in their engineering teams. I guess it's easier to just buy a tool that will force a process overhaul, rather than doing a much more thorough process overhaul in the first place. The problem is that tools like vulnerability scanners address only one part of the problem; admittedly, it is a low hanging fruit.
Re: The Infosec Apocalypse
#19Meh, if you want your niche tool to break into big enterprise, you have to deal with compliance hoops. That's just the cost of doing business with big enterprise, certainly not a new thing. If anything, in the long term that's probably a benefit to fancy functional programming languages with complex type systems - they provide much more info for static analysis tools to work with (static analysis is pretty highly rel…
This feature is why small companies can compete with big enterprises. The big ones get the economies of scale, but they also get bogged down by being inagile.
Re: The Infosec Apocalypse
#20> In the wake of so many data leaks and hacking events enterprises no longer trust their developers and SREs to take care of security, and so protocols are being implemented top down. As if enterprises were not responsible for not properly budgeting security concerns in their engineering teams. I guess it's easier to just buy a tool that will force a process overhaul, rather than doing a much more thorough process ov…
Devs and SRE still have a very important role as SAST and DAST tools only catch a portion of security issues in code and are generally useless for gauging architectural/deployment/runtime issues.