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As security testing is increasingly shifting left, developer focused application security testing tools are bridging the gap between engineering and security.
But automated tools are not a one size fits all, with different types of automated security testing tools required across your pipeline to ship secure applications and APIs, at speed.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) and developer-focused DAST enable this and it is easily achievable with FOSSA and Bright, respectively.
How does developer focused DAST augment SCA?
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
SCA identifies security vulnerabilities in your 3rd party dependencies, by building the open source dependency trees for your applications and mapping these against a database of known vulnerabilities. It then reports vulnerable open source that has been pulled into your application, to fix or patch accordingly.
The use of open source has grown dramatically over the past few years, with flaws in open source dependencies being more prevalent than ever.
For any organization using open source, SCA like FOSSA’s should definitely be used to achieve a degree of security, but is that enough?
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
Developers are usually not familiar with DAST, which is not surprising. Historically DAST solutions were built for security teams, and run either by the internal security team or outsourced testing companies on production applications.
But DevSecOps forces those tests to be conducted much earlier in the development process.
Bright’s innovative developer-focussed DAST enables developers to detect and fix security bugs that they have introduced (the custom or 1st party code). This is done as part of the developer’s workflow or as part of their CI/CD pipeline.
With Bright, an automated DAST scan can be triggered on every build / commit or PR, to test your runtime applications and underlying APIs (whether REST, SOAP, or GraphQL), detecting vulnerabilities like SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), for example.
Scans that last minutes and not hours keep up with your rapid release cycles and are not a bottleneck, maintaining DevOps speed.
Having that direct feedback loop to developers means you can fix early and often. Bright’s plug and play integrations with your pipeline are seamless – developers can stay in their environment with Bright’s CLI, as well as integrating with the likes of CircleCI, Jenkins, JFrog, AzureDevOps, JIRA and more.
While false positives are notoriously an issue with DAST tools, Bright’s innovative engine automatically validates every finding…no need for manual validation checks, no delays, and no builds failing for no reason!
New and recurring issues are identified and flagged as such, so focus and prioritization of remediation is facilitated.
These features mean that there is less of a reliance on manual testing and enables security testing to be placed in the hands of developers.
So, which technology should you focus on and why?
FOSSA & Bright – Complete Developer-Centric AppSec Testing
To ensure your are shipping secure applications and APIs to production, SCA like FOSSA’s, and Bright’s automated DAST should be used in conjunction.
FOSSA’s SCA gets you visibility of your open source vulnerabilities that may underpin your applications, that the creative features are built on top of.
Bright’s innovative DAST lets you very easily detect security vulnerabilities across your applications and APIs. Test every build and get results you can trust, as we automatically validate results free from false positives.
By deploying and leveraging both FOSSA’s SCA and Bright’s DAST, you are covering all your bases. This will enable you to find and fix a broader range of vulnerabilities faster and earlier.
The question is not whether you should be using SCA or DAST, but how and when you can start to use them together across your pipelines. Small hint – see the answer below!
Get started today
New to Bright and/or FOSSA? Try us both for free to start testing for vulnerabilities in your applications today.
Sign up for a FREE Bright account here – follow our quick step wizard and be up and scanning in minutes!
Try out FOSSA for free here too!
You can learn more about Bright, all our integrations and more on our knowledge base
