3 years ago

Category: Software, Business, Data

By Stuart Foster The vast majority of data breaches and other software security incidents occur when attackers exploit vulnerable code in an application, which is why SAST and SAST tools are essential.

As a result, development teams leverage a number of application security testing tools to catch flaws and reduce security risks.SAST tools are some of the most used and essential security testing tools that DevSecOps teams can use in their workflow. To help you understand and make the best out of these tools, this article will explore everything you need to know about static application security testing.Here, we give an overview of what is SAST and explore what software vulnerabilities SAST tools can detect.Read along or jump to the section that interests you the most:Static application security testing (SAST) is a software testing methodology designed for inspecting and analyzing application source code to uncover security vulnerabilities. Also known as “white-box testing”, SAST tools — such as static code analyzers — scan your application’s code in a non-running state (before the code is compiled).SAST tools are crucial in the software development space since they detect vulnerabilities that leave systems open to attacks such as:Static application security testing is just one element of a complete automated security testing toolkit.

Besides application security, SAST is also used to detect bugs, improve code quality, and enforce pre-defined coding standards.At its core, static application security testing is designed to solve three problems:Software applications are susceptible to a wide range of security vulnerabilities.