Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Tools
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Snyk’s Developer Security Platform automatically integrates with a developer’s workflow and helps security teams to collaborate with their development teams. It boasts a developer-first approach that ensures organizations can secure all of the critical components of their applications from code to cloud, driving dev…
Learn More About Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Tools
What are Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Tools?
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools examine the codebase of applications while they are not running to identify vulnerabilities before the application is deployed. SAST is a segment of Application Security Testing, which is a key element of ensuring that web and cloud-native applications remain secure. Static Application Security Tests (SAST) are the most legacy form of application security testing. Various tools and managed services exist to provide continuous testing, besides application security platforms that include app testing as part of their functionality.
SAST tools provide “white-box testing,” which gives more granularity in surfacing vulnerabilities, down to the line of code. SAST allows for this level of visibility because it looks directly at the source code itself while the application is not running. This overlaps with broader static code analysis tools. However, SAST tools are purely security-focused, while SCA tools are more general-use.
Static application security testing provides some advantages, and drawbacks, compared to other application security testing methods. SAST allows developers and security testers to examine the application’s entire codebase in one test. It also can test applications before the code is ready to compile or run, enabling testing earlier in the software development life cycle (SDLC). On the other hand, SAST tools can’t test applications that are mid-dynamic testing or already in production, because they only analyze at-rest code. SAST can also miss non-code based security context, such as secondary security tools that are in place external to the codebase itself. Finally, it can be a heavier implementation lift than some more recent AST tools. Due to these limitations, SAST tools are often used together with dynamic application security testing (DAST) and interactive application security testing (IAST).
SAST Tools Comparison
Consider these factors when comparing SAST tools:
False Positives: What volume of false positives do current users of each product encounter? How easy is it to manage these false positives when they do (inevitably) occur? False positive management can be the difference between successful and failed SAST adoption.
IDE Integration: How easily does each tool integrate into the business’s existing developer environments? This will heavily impact how early in development SAST methods can be used, and how disruptive testing is to the SDLC.
Automation: To what extent can static testing be automated within the development environment? SAST has traditionally been considered one of the more manual application security testing methods, so any level of automation can improve efficiency dramatically.
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