It’s been a few years since DevSecOps has become the name of the game in software development. Making security a part of the DevOps cycle is the new standard of the industry. Companies are still struggling to shift security left and integrate it throughout the SDLC. It is imperative because of the recent rise in cyberattacks and the scale of cybercrime being so large that $4.2 billion has been lost due to online attacks and fraud in the US alone in 2020.
It has now been established that automation is the keystone of making secure applications. Automation leads to the use of tools that can be trusted with the safety of the development process. Here are the top 5 of them.
Codacy
Codacy is a quality automation and standardization solution that helps development teams shift testing as far left in the development process as possible. It lets the developers identify and resolve cybersecurity and other issues early on in the development lifecycle. It has static code analysis tools that help developers and engineers with issues pertaining to security, duplication, complexity, and style violations. It can be used to scan the code automatically at any phase of development.
The goal of Codacy is to help software development teams make good engineering decisions and improve both productivity and quality of the end product. Using Codacy can save development teams a lot of time that would otherwise be invested in manually reviewing the code. The extensive database behind this tool also makes it possible to spot flaws, inconsistencies and vulnerabilities in the code that humans might overlook.
The pricing for Codacy starts at just $15/user/month if you pay annually and $18 if paid monthly.
Docker
Docker is a comprehensive suite of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) tools that are built to execute services and applications in their own self-sustained spaces known as containers. These isolate the application from the environment they are operating inside by providing OS-level virtualization.
Docker lets developers install all the dependencies required by a service inside the container so that they do not have to invest time and resources in installing unnecessary or different versions of the same package on their computer. This makes distributing the entire working environment across computers among or outside the team extremely easy. Instead of installing all the dependencies, the developers just need to copy the Docker Image File.
Docker has its own DockerHub where the image can be uploaded, and you can also go for third-party service providers like Google’s Container Registry or Amazon Elastic Container Registry.
Docker is made secure by a feature called docker image security scanning. This is a process of looking for known security vulnerabilities in the packages that make up the Docker Image. This gives developers the chance to identify and fix vulnerabilities in any component of the Docker Image before the container is pushed to DockerHub or any other container registry.
SonarQube
SonarQube is an open-source project by SonarSource. It is another of the ways of automating code review. This code review tool scans the code for bugs, vulnerabilities, and other weaknesses. The best thing about SonarQube is that it seamlessly integrates with the native workflow of the team and inspects the code continually. It works for all branches of the project and for all pull requests.
This software works with 30 programming languages and is equally useful for small development teams and bigger enterprises. The database behind this tool is strong enough to identify any known vulnerability in the code that the team writes and also in the open-source and other components used in the project.
The basic version of this software is free, with different paid versions for developers, enterprises, and data centers.
Acunetix
Acunetix is an all-in-one security scanner that helps developers identify and remedy vulnerabilities in the earliest stages of development. This tool is designed to help companies that have a major web presence and are at constant risk of hacker attacks. It lets the developers detect issues fast and fix them quickly. This software acts on the principles of automation, centralization, and integration.
Acunetix is considered one of the strongest solutions available on the market because it focuses on cybersecurity, provides high-speed scanning, gives the lowest number of false positives, is easy to use, and integrates well with the SDLC.
Logz.io
Logz.io is a company built by engineers to help software engineers and developers with creating secure and dependable products. It provides scalable, cloud-based observability backed by ELK & Grafana. Using this makes troubleshooting, scanning, and securing the code easy and less time-intensive for teams.
This log analysis and log management solution provide a number of helpful features, the most important one of them being security analytics that makes it possible for developers to address vulnerabilities and enforce compliance of standards in their coding.
These security analytics let developers make security a part of their DevOps pipeline. This enables them to identify code vulnerabilities without having to compromise on the speed or agility of the development process.
The basic version of this software is free, and pro versions are charged on a per-GB data used basis.
Conclusion
The current industry standards of software development call for speed and security. If all the work is done manually by developers, both these cannot be achieved at the same time. That’s where automation comes in. There are products available on the market that can review the code written by the developers and make sure that it does not have any security vulnerability.
The five best tools in this field are Codacy, Docker, SonarQube, Acunetix, and Logz.io. These tools can be used to detect vulnerabilities and shortcomings in the code at an earlier stage and fix them.
About the Author
Hi, I am Alex Miller a front-end developer for a VoIP company in Tennessee. As a part of my routine, I review the latest gadgets and applications. Currently, I am covering the best apps available in all the major categories. I love watching football and Netflixing when I have some extra time.
First Name can be reached online at (milleralex572 [at] gmail.com) and at https://en.gravatar.com/milleralex1
