Regardless of the project or industry, having secure, high-quality code is a critical factor in an organization’s success. If code quality is lacking, or if there are significant vulnerabilities, a business risks financial losses and resource drain.
IT professionals have linked business operations with code development for decades under a model known as DevOps. In this model, the barrier between software development and IT operations has been broken. Engineers collaborate alongside operations teams to efficiently and reliably develop code. As a result, code is designed to function in specific environments, and a continuous feedback loop allows for collaboration and communication.
In recent years, the practice has been re-examined and refined to incorporate security concerns, resulting in the emergence of DevSecOps. The integration of security into this method has yielded significant changes in cyberspace and has proved far more effective in reducing code vulnerabilities.
To create high-quality, secure code, there are several steps teams can take.
Better code comes down to a few key factors: proper security testing, meticulous quality assurance, effective runtime protection, and code obfuscation.
Code security testing and analysis are a vital aspect of today’s competitive world. Proper security testing can alert developers to insufficient authentication, information leakage, poor binary protection, format string vulnerability, insufficient transport layer security, and more. Done manually, this is a tedious task; therefore, professional code scanning solutions are often used to significantly reduce the complexity of this step.
The primary method for code security testing is Static Application Security Testing (SAST). This involves code scanning to identify vulnerabilities within source code. This allows the coder to re-examine vulnerabilities and take preventive measures against possible cyberattacks.
SAST can be executed during the early development stages of the software, allowing teams to test the security of an application before it’s up and running. With the right tools, organizations can identify and monitor issues in real-time as the code is being created.
Another way to test software security is to hire a professional security agency or an in-house IT security team. While this approach may prove thorough and effective, it may also become costly and time-consuming.
SAST tools prove especially useful when developers inject third-party source code into their final product. Third-party code has its advantages, but open source components come with their own downsides. The most compelling ones are the threat of weak or malicious code. These issues make it undesirable for developers to add third-party code to a final product; however, SAST tools offer reassurance by analyzing the code and generating detailed reports (even for outsourced code).
This process can be completed by a dedicated security team, but the strain on resources often leads organizations to seek out code security tools instead.
Code quality is determined by a team’s goals and the organization’s priorities for which they work. However, high-quality code can be identified through two primary traits: reliability and consistency. Clean code should withstand the test of time — and the scrutiny of routine testing.
Better quality code also leads to higher code safety and usability of the application. As such, it is imperative that teams ensure the code’s quality meets the mark.
Since there isn’t a single standard to which the quality of the code must measure up, quality tests vary based on the application’s requirements and the developers’ needs. To measure the quality of a given piece of code, these tests assess the following traits:
By examining the code from these perspectives, developers can reduce the number of defects found throughout the code. Unfortunately, when an individual programmer tests a code’s quality, less than 50% of the defects are rectified on average. As a result, developers employ several tools and practices to ensure quality.
The best way to elevate code quality is to use a single coding standard. This may be done at the start of the software development life cycle and will promote a more consistent style throughout the application.
Modern static analyzers offer fantastic versatility, analyzing code not only for security vulnerabilities but also for incoherent or low-quality code, providing real-time feedback. To do this efficiently, these code scanning tools are run in the early stages of software development. They are employed after every portion of the code is completed to ensure consistency. While these do not eliminate the possibility of bad code, code analyzers significantly reduce the likelihood of facing such problems before the code review stage even commences.
Unit testing is a technique that isolates a single portion of code and examines it by initializing that portion and stimulating it with an action to observe the result. This ensures that the code is running as intended and is at an acceptable quality level.
Code review is a staple in ensuring that the code is of high quality. This step should always be performed by a dedicated professional in coordination with the use of relevant tools.
The concept that all code can be reverse-engineered, given enough effort and time, is well known. However, a large portion of code (especially code developed on Android, Java, and .NET) can be cracked in virtually no time. To protect code from malicious actors, developers use code obfuscation to make it highly complex for attackers to reverse-engineer.
The methods of obfuscation vary, but they are primarily executed by layering code without altering the software’s functionality.
This approach changes the names of variables and objects. This allows for layers upon layers of alteration to take place in the code, making reverse engineering it an exponentially more challenging task for both decompilers and humans.
This is a very basic but effective technique that adds dummy code to the software. The code doesn’t affect the logical flow of the program, but it increases the amount of data available to decompiler programs, making it larger and thus more complex to process.
RASP is a framework that developers implement alongside software code to report on and prevent outside attacks on the system. RASP operates by continuously analyzing the operation of running software and gathering that information to eliminate threats. This technology has been developed, with the first deployment occurring in 2012, resulting in several top-tier providers available on the market.
Software development is no easy task, and performing manual security testing, maintenance, and additional protection can hinder organizations’ ability to focus on essential business tasks.
For obfuscation and runtime protection, PreEmptive helps organizations make applications more resilient. To save time and reduce risk, businesses are encouraged to use tools like Kiuwan Insights Open Source, which tests for quality code, remediates vulnerabilities, and ensures compliance.
