Scaling security coverage in agile companies is only possible by empowering developers to easily discover, triage, and fix such vulnerabilities before they make it to production servers.
Empowering Developers to Own Security Testing
Empowering developers to fully own security requires a reset in security tooling. The market is filled with a plethora of application security scanners and pen-test tools.
These conventional tools were designed for AppSec professionals, cannot be easily operated by developers, and require significant configuration and triage (by security professionals) before vulnerabilities/defects show up in a developer’s backlog.
A key difference between current-day security tooling and developer-first security tooling is: what you see when you “zoom out”.
For security staff, zooming out means looking at known vulnerabilities across all applications and all API endpoints to better understand overall risk. For developers, it means looking at all the defects of the API endpoints they own — including functionality, operability, and more — to better understand the quality of the application.
This distinction in the big picture view requires rethinking how to detect/present security flaws, by placing them within an application context (and not a risk context).
Another big distinction of conventional security tooling is the focus on efficient triage (eliminating false positives) and reporting of vulnerabilities to the respective dev teams. However, developer tooling is about finding & fixing problems in a self-serve manner, rather than just reporting them.
So developer-first security tooling must be about self-service, zero false positives, and helping developers fix “real” vulnerabilities with built-in security expertise & guidance. The easier it is for developers to make the right decision, the more secure the application will be.
Levo’s Dev-First Security Testing Embeds Security into DevOPs Workflows
Levo is a purpose-built, developer-first API security solution that fully automates API penetration testing in CI/CD pipelines.
Levo auto generates security tests that are run by developers in CI/CD, in a self-serve manner similar to unit and integration tests.
Designed by developers for modern development teams, Levo empowers developers to own and scale security coverage.
Thanks for reading,
Harish
