Application Security Orchestration and Correlation

At a high level, the most impactful benefit of ASOC is the role it plays in increasing DevSecOps efficiency. As agile development demands increased speeds and more tooling, adequate management of resources and remediation activities pose great challenges for security teams. ASOC plays a key role in helping tackle these challenges. 

More specifically, ASOC benefits security efforts in several ways:

• Improved resource allocation: Introducing ASOC into a development environment provides critical remediation prioritization information without hindering existing practices. AppSec tools uncover a large number of vulnerabilities, some which may be false positives that don’t need code fixes. This leads to an overload of identified issues that requires assessment to determine whether they truly need attention. An ASOC solution provides critical prioritization of findings, enabling resource and cost savings. 
• Centralized vulnerability management: While each AppSec tool used in a development environment plays an important role in securing an organization’s applications, they all provide results in different formats. Additionally, more than one tool may find the same issue. Efforts to weed through results from all AppSec tools are time-consuming and slow down development. With an ASOC solution, analysis results from multiple AppSec tools and manual testing are aggregated, the same issues identified by different tools are deduplicated, and all remaining results are automatically correlated and prioritized in a single central hub. 
• Better understanding of risk: ASOC solutions enable CISOs and development leads to quickly identify the highest-risk projects in their application portfolios. They also provide metrics showing how well teams are performing vulnerability management and AppSec activities over time. Using these metrics, teams can understand how well or how poorly they’re doing at securing their applications and make adjustments accordingly.  
• Continuous and automated scanning: In place of manually scanning applications, ASOC solutions offer a way to schedule automated scans for all the security tools an organization uses. Frequency and specific actions of the tool can all be defined and set up within an ASOC solution. This removes the need for piecemeal or individual scanning activities. 
• Automated AppSec processes: ASOC solutions allow predetermined cross-team workflows to be easily set up and automated. Rather than relying on communication between security engineers and developers, both teams are notified when something falls outside of their agreed-upon processes.

A common AppSec problem is the separation between vulnerability management and continuous integration / continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines. ASOC solutions can help bridge this gap by combining integrated testing results from multiple sources into a single tool, correlating the findings and prioritizing high-risk vulnerabilities. This allows developers to orchestrate security within a CI/CD pipeline without hindering development velocity.

As demands on security teams continue to grow, ASOC will undoubtedly play an increasingly critical role in helping to alleviate the vulnerability overload that taxes security and development teams alike. Offering continuous and automated scanning in existing pipelines, ASOC solutions provide a single source from which to schedule automated scans across all tools used in an organization. The future state of AppSec will likely involve organizations moving toward adopting ASOC as their single source of truth, and using it to manage their AppSec portfolio effectively and efficiently. 

Intelligent Orchestration by Synopsys

Intelligent Orchestration enables you to perform the right tests at the right time and deliver the right results to the right people. It provides customized AppSec pipelines that automate security testing throughout the entire software development life cycle. It automatically runs the right security tools or triggers manual testing activities based on how significant code changes are, the total risk score, and a company’s own security policies.

Code Dx by Synopsys

Code Dx is an ASOC solution that helps keep you at the forefront innovation without compromising security or speed—all through the power of automation.

It offers the ability to centralize and harmonize application security testing across all development pipelines in a scalable, repeatable, and automated way. Code DX aggregates, correlates, and then prioritizes results.

The Code Dx Correlation Engine reduces the time spent fixing issues by combining, deduplicating, and correlating the results from all your AppSec scanning tools—static and dynamic, commercial and open source—from a single console to manage your vulnerabilities more effectively.

With prioritized results and the ability to track remediation, teams are held accountable and key stakeholders can easily understand how well the organization is performing its security duties. 

To learn more about our products and how they can help, visit
www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/intelligent-orchestration-code-dx-integration/