Shifting left is proven to help DevSecOps teams create more secure applications by earlier inclusion of security testing practices in the application development lifecycle and CI/CD pipeline. The Cloud Security Alliance estimates that about 90 percent of organizations are in various stages of adopting DevSecOps. IBM’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach report notes that, among 28 different factors, using DevSecOps was the second most important factor in reducing the cost of a data breach.
SCA, SAST, DAST, and IAST are among the many tools that help DevSecOps teams create more secure applications. There’s no question that these tools offer essential tests for known vulnerabilities and weaknesses in code.
However, applications today are distributed, dynamic, and complex by nature, spanning hundreds of services across hybrid cloud and third-party service providers. Testing branches of code in isolation is a great start, but it only reveals a subset of the attack surfaces or vulnerabilities that exist in an application. To see everything, you need to validate right and push their testing and visibility into production.
This blog highlights how Bionic Application Security Posture Management assesses the security of your applications post-deployment to validate the effectiveness of your shift left tools and DevSecOps strategy.
Deployed Code as the Foundation of Truth
Reliable data drives better decisions. Bionic directly analyzes deployed code to get an accurate and complete view of your applications in production.
Without agents or sensors, Bionic scans every line of code in a deployed application to find every service, API, dependency, and data flow. This is different from traditional solutions that observe network traffic to identify the components that are invoked with requests and transactions.
For every new change or CI/CD deployment, Bionic collects all related artifacts, packages, files, metadata, configurations, manifests, and environment variables. Because we use the actual deployed binaries and environmental configurations of production, you’ll get full visibility and a code-accurate inventory. Having this bill of materials will help you understand what your total attack surface entails, which is usually different from what your pre-production tools and analysis have detected.
Accurate Application Architecture Mapping
After collection, Bionic then reverse engineers the artifacts and configuration data to create a detailed visual representation of all application code dependencies and attack surfaces as they are in production.
This map gives you a complete picture that you’ve previously pieced together from various pre-production tests, outdated diagrams, and institutional knowledge.
Sensitive Data Discovery Classification
Understanding where sensitive data lives in your applications is the first step to protecting it. Bionic analyzes deployed code binaries and infers what type of data is being requested through the associated SQL statements. For example, Bionic understands keywords like SSN, name, age, and address, and then tags the service as containing PII. Bionic can also import your existing cloud or infrastructure tags to denote the presence of PII/PCI/PHI data.
In addition, Bionic detects when application services access new data types or new data sources. Once detected, it raises a violation, assesses the severity of that violation, and incorporates that information into the service’s overall risk score.
Business Risk-based Prioritization
Bionic’s risk scoring capability focuses on improving your overall application security posture while reducing security alert fatigue that some shift left tools create. It does this by assessing the application services that, in the context of production, create the most business risk to the organization.
Bionic assesses the severity of violations in a service, connectivity (i.e., internet facing or internal), and proximity to sensitive data when assigning a risk score.
By surfacing the top risks, security and engineering teams can focus on fixing these few critical matters instead of blindly plowing through a mountain of tickets that lack production context.
It’s Time to Validate, Right?
Even with earlier and more frequent pre-production testing, there’s still no guarantee that what was once secure will stay secure. That’s because shifting left is only part of a strong security strategy. You must validate that those efforts are working by actively and continuously analyzing production.
Ready to see the reality of your applications in production? Request your demo of Bionic ASPM.
