In an ever-evolving digital landscape, ensuring the security and integrity of software applications is paramount. With the increasing complexity of codebases and emergence of new threats, a significant challenge for developers is identifying and addressing vulnerabilities within the code.

With its emphasis on providing Artificial intelligence powered security services, AWS recently previewed their static application testing offering – AWS CodeGuru security. The tool employees machine learning capabilities and automated reasoning to detect code vulnerabilities. CodeGuru Security incorporates  security best practices followed by AWS and draws from extensive training on millions of code vulnerability assessments conducted within Amazon.

AWS CodeGuru Security employs detectors from the Amazon CodeGuru Detector Library to analyze code and identify a range of problems, such as resource leaks, hardcoded credentials, and log injection. These detectors are currently supported in the languages JavaScript, Python, and Java. Secret scan can also be done in text files.

Key features

• Vulnerability detection with high precision – CodeGuru Security utilizes machine learning algorithms built on extensive AWS and Amazon.com security expertise to identify potential security weaknesses present in your code. By employing advanced detectors, CodeGuru Security scrutinizes for code vulnerabilities such as injection flaws, data leakage, insufficient cryptography, and encryption gaps. Regular updates are made to the detectors and security policies to ensure their relevance and effectiveness.
• Remediation assistance – CodeGuru Security employs automated reasoning to offer recommended code modifications for specific vulnerabilities.
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) integration– With its API based design, it allows you to automate your security scans and integrate them with your existing development workflow.
• Tracking the status of security findings – Leveraging powerful algorithms, CodeGuru security can automatically track when a reported security issue is fixed and close the finding.
• Metric dashboards – CodeGuru Security identifies security vulnerabilities throughout all your code scans and generates comprehensive findings metrics that are showcased in a user-friendly dashboard. This dashboard presents valuable information about your security findings, including average time to resolve issues, types of vulnerabilities detected in your scans, and the distribution of severity levels for the identified vulnerabilities.
• Code vulnerabilities prioritization – The code vulnerability analysis classifies detected security vulnerabilities based on their severity, enabling you to prioritize the code vulnerability that require immediate attention or where you prefer to allocate your remediation efforts.
• Continuous scan of environments – By enabling automatic code scanning within your workflow, you can conduct continuous scans of your files while developing applications, enabling early detection of security vulnerabilities during the development process.

CodeGuru Security can be used to scan code for security issues in a variety of ways, including through the AWS console, the AWS CLI, the AWS SDKs, or by integrating with other services. Integration with following products and services are currently supported – GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, AWS CLI, AWS CodePipeline, AWS SageMaker Studio, JupyterLab, AWS Inspector and Amazon CodeWhisperer.

To start using CodeGuru Security in your IDE, you need to install the AWS Toolkit made for your IDE. Once installed, you can turn on CodeGuru Security by following the instructions in the toolkit’s documentation. Once CodeGuru Security is enabled, you will receive security alerts directly within your IDE while coding.

To incorporate CodeGuru Security into your CI/CD pipeline, begin by creating an IAM role that grants CodeGuru Security access to your pipeline. Next, integrate CodeGuru Security by introducing a step that initiates the analysis within your pipeline. Once CodeGuru Security is successfully integrated, it will automatically scan your code for vulnerabilities every time the pipeline is executed.

In conclusion, AWS CodeGuru Security is a highly effective and essential tool for ensuring the integrity and security of your software applications. With its comprehensive suite of features, it offers developers and organizations the ability to identify and remediate security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and potential risks throughout the development lifecycle.