How do you balance the trade-offs between speed, accuracy, and cost of security scanning tools?

Set accuracy as your top priority to guarantee thorough threat detection, but match it to your unique security requirements to prevent overspending. Maintain operating efficiency by optimising speed while keeping in mind that extremely quick tools may miss more subtle hazards. Be frugal with your money; pricey doesn't always equate to superior. Look for affordable options with a feature set that is sufficient for your organization's needs. To maintain an ideal equilibrium, regularly assess and modify your strategy in light of changing cyberthreats and technical developments.

1. Define Clear Objectives: Clearly define your security scanning objectives. Understand the specific risks you want to address, compliance requirements, and the types of vulnerabilities you are most concerned about. This will help you choose a tool that aligns with your priorities. 2. Risk Assessment: Conduct a risk assessment to identify the critical assets and potential threats. Prioritize scanning efforts based on the criticality of assets. High-value assets may require more accurate and thorough scanning, even if it comes with a higher cost. 3. Scanning Frequency: Determine the frequency of security scans based on your organization's risk tolerance and the pace of changes in your environment.

AppSec tools help detect vulnerabilities early and cost-effectively. SAST scans source code for potential flaws, while DAST tests running applications for runtime vulnerabilities. IAST combines these approaches, providing detailed insights into both codebase and execution. SCA checks third-party components for known vulnerabilities (critical today with complex supply chains) Inclusion of fuzz testing, which introduces random inputs to discover unexpected behaviors, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, which scan infrastructure scripts for vulnerabilities and drift, further strengthen security in the SDLC. Integrating these tools ensures robust, secure software development, reducing risks and aligning with proactive security practices.

To balance the trade-offs between speed, accuracy, and cost of security scanning tools, we choose tools that fit the organisation's budget while providing reliable detection without slowing down development processes. Automated tools offer speed, but they are combined with manual checks for accuracy in critical areas. For cost efficiency, we prioritise tools that integrate well with existing systems and scale as needed, ensuring comprehensive coverage without overspending or compromising on thoroughness.

Speed is essential to ensure swift deployment and continuous integration. Rapid scans allow developers to receive immediate feedback, facilitating quick fixes and maintaining development velocity. However, an overemphasis on speed can compromise accuracy, leading to missed vulnerabilities. To mitigate this, integrate fast, lightweight scans during development and comprehensive, in-depth scans at critical stages. Cost considerations involve evaluating the trade-off between tool capabilities and budget constraints. Prioritize tools that can scale with your organization’s growth, providing a sustainable security strategy.

SAST are generally faster than DAST, while IAST requires the automated functional testing of the application so if your functional test misses any component that IAST will also miss that component, so coverage of functional test is very important here To improve the speed of the scans then keep on tuning these tools as per your application and also focus on incremental scans so save some scan time in CI/CD

Balancing the trade-offs between speed, accuracy, and cost of security scanning tools is crucial for effective security testing. Speed is essential for quickly identifying vulnerabilities, but it shouldn't compromise accuracy. Tools that sacrifice accuracy for speed might miss critical issues or generate false positives, leading to wasted time and effort. On the other hand, overly accurate tools may be slow and resource-intensive, impacting productivity and increasing costs. Finding the right balance involves selecting tools that offer a good compromise between speed, accuracy, and cost, based on the specific requirements and constraints of the project.

Automate Where Possible: Utilize automated security scanning tools to speed up the scanning process. Automation reduces the time and effort required for manual testing, enabling faster detection of vulnerabilities and security issues. Prioritize Critical Assets: Focus your scanning efforts on critical assets, such as high-value applications or systems handling sensitive data. By prioritizing these assets, you can allocate resources more effectively and ensure that security scans are conducted promptly where they matter most. Optimize Scan Configurations: Fine-tune scan configurations to balance speed and accuracy. Adjust parameters such as scan depth, concurrency, and sensitivity levels to optimize scan performance without sacrificing

Speed is crucial in today’s fast-paced development cycles. DAST tools are generally faster since they test applications during runtime, but SAST and IAST may require more time due to their static analysis or instrumentation processes.

SAST generally gives much more false positives then the DAST so it is important to keep on marking these vulnerabilities as false positives in the tool, and it is true that SAST give more better results than DAST because SAST is a white box testing but DAST actually give such results that can exploitable because it is a black box testing

As a cybersecurity professional, I've often encountered the challenge of balancing accuracy when selecting security scanning tools. In a recent project, we utilized SAST tools for their robust code analysis capabilities, particularly in identifying intricate vulnerabilities embedded within the application's source code. However, we supplemented this with DAST tools to validate our findings in a real-world runtime environment, ensuring comprehensive coverage across all potential attack vectors. By leveraging the strengths of both SAST and DAST tools, we achieved a higher level of accuracy in our vulnerability assessments, minimizing the risk of overlooking critical security flaws while avoiding unnecessary false positives.

DAST and IAST tend to provide highly accurate results as they examine runtime behavior closely. SAST, might produce more false positives as it is based on an over-approximation of all possible behaviours of the program statically.

In my experience, tailoring off-the-shelf security tools to match your application, requirement and business use case significantly improve accuracy by focusing on relevant areas, reduces false positives and negatives, prioritizes critical vulnerabilities.

In my experience, cost varies greatly among these tools. SAST and IAST can be expensive due to their in-depth analysis, whereas DAST tools are usually more cost-effective. However, hidden costs like false positives can add up.

Cost considerations play a significant role in the selection of security scanning tools, especially for organizations with budgetary constraints. In my experience, we adopted a strategic approach by evaluating the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with each tool, encompassing not only the initial acquisition expenses but also ongoing maintenance, training, and support costs. While SAST tools may entail higher upfront investments due to their advanced analysis capabilities, we found that integrating them early into the development lifecycle led to significant cost savings by detecting and remedying vulnerabilities at an early stage.

Evaluate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) of security scanning tools, including not only the initial purchase or subscription costs but also ongoing expenses such as maintenance, support, and operational overhead. Compare the TCO of different tools to assess their long-term affordability. Choose Cost-Effective Solutions: Select security scanning tools that offer a good balance between affordability and effectiveness. Consider open-source or community-supported tools that may have lower upfront costs but still provide robust security scanning capabilities. Evaluate the cost-effectiveness of different tools based on their features. Optimize resource utilization to reduce the cost of security scanning.

Don't forget that your CI/CD pipelines are typically priced based on the number of "build" minutes run each month. This accounting principle keeps track of the total compute time a pipeline takes from beginning to end. These minutes are finite and you only get so many per month. Understanding this, it is important to remember to optimize your pipeline tasks for speed. Don't run full-fledged SAST scans as they will take a long time. Instead, use more focused SAST rulesets optimized for CI. If you run secret scanning, don't scan every git commit every time you analyze the codebase; just analyze the last 10 commits or less. Same thing with your SCA scans, it's not necessary to scan all the git commits with every SCA scan.

Achieving a harmonious balance between speed, accuracy, and cost requires a holistic approach that considers the unique requirements and constraints of each organization. In a recent endeavor, we adopted a hybrid approach by integrating SAST, DAST, and IAST tools into our CI/CD pipelines, enabling continuous and automated security testing throughout the development lifecycle. By leveraging automation and orchestration capabilities, we optimized resource utilization and minimized time-to-detection without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, regular feedback loops and iterative refinement of tool settings allowed us to fine-tune the balance between speed and accuracy, ensuring timely detection of vulnerabilities while reducing false positives.

Define Priorities: Start by defining your priorities and objectives for security scanning. Determine which factors are most critical for your organization, such as the need for fast results, high accuracy in vulnerability detection, or cost-effectiveness. Assess Tool Capabilities: Evaluate the capabilities of different security scanning tools in terms of speed, accuracy, and cost. Consider factors such as scanning coverage, false positive rates, scalability, and pricing models to identify tools that align with your priorities and requirements. Optimize Scan Configurations: Fine-tune scan configurations to balance speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness. Adjust parameters such as scan depth, sensitivity levels.

To strike the right balance, consider your application’s criticality, development speed, and budget. High-risk apps may require constant scanning with SAST, while low-risk ones could benefit from the speed of DAST. A hybrid approach might also work.

To find a balance, you need to take different approaches with the various tools. For SAST tools, look for ones that don't need to compile code, as they are generally much faster. Those can easily be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline build process and only add a minor time penalty. Some can even be integrated into the developer's IDE, reducing the time spent in the CI/CD pipeline. Other tools, such as DAST and even SCA, can be run on a scheduled basis rather than in the CI/CD pipeline, such as nightly, especially if they take more than 24 hours to run. But if you do run them outside of the pipeline, please ensure that you still have gates enabled to prevent security defects from progressing into production.

Ideally, the organization can leverage free scanners that integrate into the IDE so that developers can get early feedback and correct issues before checking in the code. Once the code is checked in, COTS should be used to scan broader parts of the code, and higher risk code. Adjust these tools based on ongoing feedback to optimize their effectiveness. However, often times the free tools are capable of providing comparable results to COTS for basic scanning. For the more comprehensive scans on higher risk code, the COTS should be used. This employees a combination of rapid, free scanners for frequent checks and more comprehensive scanners for high risk code. Providing the balance of reduced costs, while providing wider coverage.

In my experience, we found that conducting a thorough risk assessment and prioritizing critical assets and applications helped prioritize investments in security scanning tools effectively. Additionally, fostering collaboration between security teams, development teams, and business stakeholders facilitated informed decision-making and resource allocation, ensuring that investments in security scanning tools align with business goals and risk management strategies. By taking a proactive and strategic approach to tool selection, organizations can maximize the value derived from security scanning initiatives while mitigating potential trade-offs between speed, accuracy, and cost.

Think about the integration capabilities, scalability, and support of the tools. Ensure your team has the expertise to interpret results effectively. Regular updates and staying informed about emerging threats are also key in maintaining a strong security posture.

In addition to the trade-offs already discussed, it is important to consider the environment where security scanning tools will be utilized. This becomes particularly significant incase of DAST/IAST because in restricted environments, request processing might be restricted or in some cases not allowed.

Security scanning was developed to assist in fixing the results not just identifying them. In other words, security scanning is just A STEP to a more secure appllication. I would highly recommend addressing security findings based on where the findings are within your threat model and its corresponding criticality for the purpose of prioritization. We cannot just find security issues/vulnerabilities but also we need to take pride in patching/fixing them. Maybe in an automated fashion....perhaps

Don't boil the ocean and know what your goals are. Are you trying to actually find issues? Are you trying to meet compliance or customer demands? Do you have the staff to resolve issues that are found. You need to be able to address these questions before embarking on the AST journey. Without understanding whether your organization is capable of taking on an AST tool, you will likely soon find your team buried in results with diminishing trust in the AST and reduced ROI.