In fast-paced coding environments, where critical deadlines demand that code be written, tested and deployed within a short time period, unsafe coding practices are very prone to creep-in, which may lead to errors from the security aspect. This code is where security defects originate, which can lead to threats and vulnerabilities in an application and its functionalities. Code reviews identify programming flaws that can make applications vulnerable to attack and exploitation, for mitigating risks and eliminating architectural flaws.
Secure code review is the process of auditing the code of an application on a line by line basis for its security quality. This ensures that the application is developed properly so that the application defends itself in its own environment.
A Code Review discovers implementation-level vulnerabilities introduced during coding and recommends remediation for those coding errors. It provides an analysis of an existing codebase and locates code constructs that lead to security vulnerabilities. A security code review is designed to highlight potential security vulnerabilities within the application based upon a defined application threat-model. These services provide a very granular level of review on the actual application source code in order to ensure that best practices of secure coding are in place, thus providing the highest level of scrutiny.
Qseap is well versed in secure code reviews for nearly all programming languages in use
today, including: Java, .NET, C / C++, C#, ASP, Visual Basic, Visual Basic.NET, ABAP, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python, TCL, AJAX and assembly language.
We perform source code audits for our clients with an established hybrid methodology by combining scripts, custom tools, static analysis tools, automated tools and manual code review to uncover the highest number of flaws possible.
During code reviews, we look for the following flaws in the code:
● Application Architecture Security
● Input Validation Filters
● Session based attacks
● End user information disclosure attacks, between users
● Cross Site request attacks
● Cross domain redirection attacks
● Exception management, Error reporting and information leakage
● Insecure communications
● Poor enforcement of authentication, authorization and access control
● Weak cryptographic algorithms and implementation
● Insecure database access
● Inadequate protection of data
● Missing or weak security boundaries
Flaws continued...
● Exploitable gaps in business logic
● Poor resource management
● Insufficient audit records
● Vulnerability to well-known attacks
● Miscellaneous code quality and consistency issues
● Non-compliance with organizational code development policies
● Additional risks
● Buffer overflows
● Undocumented public interfaces
● Code access security
● Unsafe and unmanaged code
● Threading, and many more
Qseap works closely with the application owners during the process to ensure thorough communication and understanding of application scope, functionality and intended design. The outcome of a Code Review is a detailed report describing each code-security issue broken down by the vulnerability itself, analysis of the severity of the finding and recommended mitigations with code samples to resolve the issues for improved security in ways that are aligned with industry best practices. This allows the development team to understand the problem areas of their code in a better way and prevent mistakes in the future.
Qseap employs a well-established hybrid methodology of using tools and manual review at the same time. A fully manual process may consume a long time, and a fully automated process may miss out the vulnerabilities. Qseap develops a threat-model for each review which helps in minimizing the time to identify all possible risks. The hybrid methodology speeds up the entire process, which fits-in seamlessly in your SDLC without hampering your critical deadlines. Qseap also performs grey-box application security tests on a need-basis, during the code review, which ensures that all vulnerabilities and backdoors are unearthed, and humanly-verified, and the maximum depth is reached.
Qseap's Secure code review induces the following significant paybacks to the customers' projects:
● Eliminates security-defects in the application before release
● Protection from vulnerabilities and attacks
● Lesser updates and patches
● Saves critical time and code rewrite costs
● Benefit over the competitor by having a reputation of releasing safer-software
