Maximize Security with GitHub Advanced Security and DAST: What It Is and How to Use It

When developers are trying to ship the latest feature or fix, security can often feel like an unwelcome bottleneck. Balancing rapid innovation with good security practices is a challenge every developer faces. But what if security could keep pace with development velocity, seamlessly integrate into your workflow, and empower you to bake security directly into every piece of your application?

If you’re a GitHub user, you’ve likely come across GitHub’s solution to this: GitHub Advanced Security. This suite of security tools is designed to shift security left and make it an integral part of your development process from right within GitHub. With features like code scanning, secret scanning, and dependency review, GitHub Advanced Security helps you identify and address vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle before they become bigger issues in production.

You can also integrate Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) into your GitHub workflow to augment what GitHub Advanced Security offers. DAST allows you to test your running applications for vulnerabilities, providing a real-world perspective on the security risks present inside your application that could be exploited at runtime.

In this blog, we’ll explore the key features of GitHub Advanced Security, delve into the benefits of DAST, and demonstrate how these powerful tools can help you build more secure applications faster. We’ll also show you how to amplify your security efforts by combining GitHub Advanced Security with StackHawk. Let’s begin by doing a brief primer on security vulnerabilities.

Security Vulnerabilities: Understanding the Risks

Security vulnerabilities are weaknesses in your code that attackers can exploit. Vulnerabilities themselves come in all shapes and sizes, with varying levels of severity and impact. If exploited, these weaknesses can lead to big problems like data breaches, financial loss, and damage to your company reputation.

Some common types of security vulnerabilities you’ve likely heard of include:

• SQL Injection: When an attacker injects malicious code into your app to access or manipulate your database.
• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS): Attackers inject malicious scripts into your web pages, to steal user data or hijack user sessions. Attackers can then impersonate your users and do actions on their behalf.
• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): Tricking users into doing unwanted actions on your website, like changing their password or making a purchase, by exploiting the trust your website has in a user’s browser.
• Remote Code Execution (RCE): Vulnerabilities that allow attackers to execute code remotely on your system. This can happen due to misconfigured systems or handling of untrusted data, especially with XML sources, which is a critical security risk.

Understanding every vulnerability type, how it appears in your code base, and whether it can be exploited is really tough to do. Luckily, unlike developers in the past, there’s been a lot of automation added to the developers’ toolkit to help with this.

As an automated set of tools, this is where GitHub Advanced Security comes in. It helps you find vulnerabilities in your code, prioritize them by severity, and provides guidance on how to fix them. By integrating security checks into your development workflow, you can prevent these vulnerabilities from being introduced into production code (without knowing how to find and fix every vulnerability manually) and build more secure applications.

What is GitHub Advanced Security?

GitHub Advanced Security is an extensive offering when it comes to tooling to build secure software. It’s a comprehensive suite of features baked into GitHub that integrate seamlessly with your development workflow. Using the various features can help you identify and address security vulnerabilities throughout the software development lifecycle and truly focuses on the shift-left methodology of finding everything as early as possible.

Of course, there are tons of security products out there but here’s what sets GitHub Advanced Security apart:

• Proactive Vulnerability Detection: Instead of reacting to security issues after they surfaced, GitHub Advanced Security helps you proactively find and mitigate security vulnerabilities before they reach production. This shift-left approach saves you time, money, and headaches in the long run.
• Seamless Integration: GitHub Advanced Security is built directly into the GitHub platform, meaning you don’t have to juggle separate tools or disrupt your existing workflows. It’s security that works the way you do, right from within GitHub.
• Comprehensive Coverage: GitHub Advanced Security provides a wide range of security capabilities to address various aspects of application security. It’s a one-stop shop for securing your codebase with tools to cover many of the most important angles.
• Automation for Efficiency: Many features within GitHub Advanced Security are automated, allowing you to streamline your security processes and focus on what matters most: building great software while automation takes care of the rest.

By integrating these powerful features into your development process, GitHub Advanced Security gives developers a better way to build secure software without sacrificing speed or agility.

Using GitHub Advanced Security

Want to start using GitHub Advanced Security? Getting started with GitHub Advanced Security is surprisingly easy. It’s designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing GitHub workflow so you can enhance your security posture without disrupting the development processes you’ve already come to build and love within GitHub.

Here’s how you can start leveraging GitHub Advanced Security:

1. Enable GitHub Advanced Security:

• If you’re using GitHub Enterprise Cloud, you can enable GitHub Advanced Security at the organization or repository level.
• For GitHub Enterprise Server, you’ll need to install the Advanced Security license on your instance.

2. Configure the features you need:

• Code scanning: Choose the languages and query suites you want to use to analyze your code. You can also customize the frequency of scans and configure alerts based on severity levels.
• Secret scanning: Enable secret scanning alerts to detect leaked credentials and prevent new secrets from entering your codebase.
• Dependency review: Configure dependency review to get alerts about vulnerable dependencies and automatically generate pull requests to update them.

3. Integrate with your workflow:

• GitHub Actions: Use GitHub Actions to automate security checks and integrate them into your CI/CD pipeline. For example, you can trigger code scanning on every pull request to ensure that new code changes don’t introduce vulnerabilities.
• GitHub Apps: Extend the functionality of GitHub Advanced Security with GitHub Apps. Several security-focused apps can enhance your security posture, such as those that provide vulnerability management or security reporting.

4. Monitor and respond to alerts:

• Regularly review your security alerts and prioritize them based on their severity.
• Use the information in the alerts to understand the vulnerabilities and take appropriate action to remediate them.
• Collaborate with your team to address security issues and improve your overall security posture.

By following these steps to get set up with GitHub Advanced Security, you can significantly enhance the security of your code and reduce the risk of security breaches. With the number of features GitHub Advanced Security offers, we should briefly cover some of the key highlights before looking at the platform’s best practices.

Code Scanning and Code Scanning Alerts: Find and Fix Vulnerabilities Fast

Powered by the CodeQL engine, GitHub’s code scanning analysis goes beyond basic checks to deeply analyze your code and identify a wide range of security flaws, like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Here is how the CodeQL engine works to identify vulnerabilities it can statically detect in the code:

1. Analyze: CodeQL analyzes your codebase to understand how data flows through your application when you push code.
2. Identify: CodeQL uses a vast database of queries to pinpoint common security vulnerabilities.
3. Alert: When a potential vulnerability is found, you get a detailed alert with information about the issue, its location, and its severity.
4. Remediate: Code scanning guides developers on how to fix the identified vulnerabilities.

With this type of scan, developers and organizations get quite a few advantages. Here are the three most important to highlight:

• Early detection: Find and fix vulnerabilities and code errors that can impact security before they reach production.
• Reduced costs: Addressing vulnerabilities early is significantly cheaper than fixing them later in the development process.
• Improved code quality: Write cleaner, more robust code.

Another neat part of CodeQL is adding the extension directly to VS Code. With the extension, you can query the code directly in your VS Code instance to identify and remedy any vulnerabilities before you commit them.

Compliance and Integrations: Seamless Security for Your Ecosystem

GitHub Advanced Security isn’t just about finding and fixing vulnerabilities; it’s also about building a secure development ecosystem that aligns with industry standards and integrates seamlessly with your existing tools.

When it comes to compliance, meeting compliance requirements can be a complex and time-consuming process. By using GitHub Advanced Security, developers can easily access tools that can help them meet various industry standards and regulations, including:

• HIPAA: Protect sensitive patient health information with features like secret and code scanning to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities that could lead to data breaches.
• PCI DSS: Secure credit card data and comply with PCI DSS requirements by leveraging secret scanning to detect and protect sensitive cardholder information.
• GDPR: Meet GDPR requirements for data privacy and protection by using features like code scanning and secret scanning to identify and address potential vulnerabilities that could expose personal data.

Of course, it also helps when tools easily integrate with the tools and processes you already use. For this, GitHub Advanced Security is designed to work seamlessly with other GitHub features and tools for a super-refined workflow. For those already in the GitHub ecosystem, Advanced Security works well with:

• GitHub Actions: Automate your security checks by integrating code scanning, secret scanning, and dependency review into your GitHub Actions workflows. This allows you to automatically trigger security scans on every pull request or code change.
• GitHub Apps: Extend the functionality of GitHub Advanced Security with security-focused GitHub Apps. These apps can provide additional security capabilities, such as vulnerability management, security reporting, and integration with other security tools.
• GitHub Enterprise Cloud: Leverage the power of GitHub Enterprise Cloud to enhance your security posture. GitHub Enterprise Cloud offers advanced security features and controls, including SAML single sign-on, access control, and audit logging.

Best Practices for Using GitHub Advanced Security

As with adopting any new tool, it makes sense to understand the best practices. With such a wide array of tools available within the platform, to get the most out of GitHub Advanced Security, here are a few best practices to follow:

1. Enable code scanning: Code scanning is a feature that scans code for security issues as it is written. Enable code scanning for your repository to identify potential vulnerabilities early on.
2. Use CodeQL: CodeQL is a code analysis engine developed by GitHub to automate security checks and also add the extension to VS Code. Use CodeQL to identify vulnerabilities in your code and prevent developers from introducing new problems.
3. Configure alerts: Configure alerts to notify you of potential security vulnerabilities in your code. This will help you stay on top of security issues and address them before they become major problems.
4. Use secret scanning: Secret scanning is a feature that identifies secrets, such as API keys and access tokens, in your code. Use secret scanning to prevent sensitive information from being exposed when developers accidentally commit it into a repo.
5. Integrate with DAST tools: Integrate GitHub Advanced Security with DAST tools to provide a comprehensive security testing strategy that covers static and dynamic analysis of your codebase.

Using GitHub Advanced Security with DAST

Although GitHub Advanced Security offers many features to keep code secure, it’s even better when used with Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools. DAST tools simulate real-world attacks on a web application, identifying vulnerabilities that attackers can actually exploit. This gives developers a view into vulnerabilities that can truly be exploited instead of false positives often found through static code analysis. By integrating GitHub Advanced Security with DAST tools, developers can holistically identify security vulnerabilities in their code and address them before they reach production.

What is DAST?

A core component of any AppSec stack, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) platforms analyze your running application to find security vulnerabilities. Unlike static analysis, which examines your code, DAST interacts with your application like a real user or attacker would. This allows these tests to discover vulnerabilities that might only be present when the application is running, such as those related to authentication, authorization, server configuration, or dynamic behavior.

DAST tools like StackHawk test your APIs and applications by simulating attacks against them and analyzing the responses to identify potential security weaknesses. This provides a more accurate picture of your application’s security posture in a real-world environment. By incorporating DAST, you can uncover vulnerabilities that platforms like GitHub Advanced Security might miss. The result is a comprehensive testing and security stack that can help you gain confidence in your application’s defenses and proactively protect against potential breaches.

Level Up Your AppSec: Combining StackHawk and GitHub Advanced Security

While GitHub Advanced Security provides a great foundation for developing secure applications and APIS, integrating a Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) solution like StackHawk can further elevate your AppSec program.

As GitHub’s preferred DAST partner, here’s how StackHawk complements GitHub Advanced Security:

• Uncovers runtime vulnerabilities: StackHawk excels at finding vulnerabilities that might not be apparent in static code analysis, such as those related to authentication, authorization, server configuration, and the dynamic behavior of your application.
• Tests in a real-world environment: Unlike static analysis, which examines code in isolation, StackHawk tests your application in its running state, providing a more accurate picture of your actual security posture and reducing false positive results.
• Seamless CI/CD integration: StackHawk is built for automation in CI/CD, just like GitHub Actions. This allows you to seamlessly integrate security testing into your development pipeline, ensuring that vulnerabilities are caught early and often.
• Actionable insights and remediation: StackHawk goes beyond simply identifying vulnerabilities. It provides detailed reports with clear, actionable remediation guidance, making it easy for developers to understand and fix security issues efficiently.
• Built for modern applications: StackHawk is designed with modern architectures in mind, making it ideal for testing APIs and microservices. It can effectively find and fix security bugs in these complex environments, where traditional security tools often struggle.

To start with StackHawk today, sign up for a 14-day free trial and combine it with GitHub Advanced Security for a best-in-class security stack. When combining GitHub Advanced Security and DAST, there’s no better companion than StackHawk.