Apps are the business now, and application security is a mess

Welcome to the Application Age.

The line between business and apps has become blurred: Are your applications supporting your business, or is your business really the applications? And as cloud applications in particular continue to drive the direction of business, application security has become a board-level critical business issue. With a dismal 4x increase in open-source vulnerabilities last year alone, and a quarter of these issues remaining unresolved, it’s clear that a traditional, static approach to application security is simply dangerous.

The Application Age demands a new approach to security. Traditional AppSec methods just don’t cut it anymore. Static tools have limited ability to understand modern cloud applications because they rely on analyzing application code without executing it. This means they can only detect issues that are present in the code itself.

But modern cloud applications rely on third-party libraries, frameworks, microservices, and cloud environments. While this increases developer productivity, it also introduces new vulnerabilities that may not be in the application’s own code.

These extended and complex architectures make it impossible for static tools to discern real issues from theoretical ones. While static tools are very good at simply scanning code for known vulnerabilities, they are completely unequipped to determine which components are actually used during runtime and how they interact with other parts of the application. False positives and misleading alerts are a direct result of this blind spot. And this blind spot afflicts every static application security tool on the market.

Kodem is Redefining Application Security for fast-moving teams

While building Kodem, we spoke with security leaders from dozens of organizations across many industries. They told us their world is chaotic because of competing priorities between security and development. Stressful because they are on the hook for breaches. Unpredictable because threats are constantly evolving. They told us they want something that is simple to install, integrate, and use with a low impact on performance. A solution that automatically susses out and tees up the most critical issues to developers and prevents insecure code from shipping. They said they need to have full, comprehensive, and continuous SDLC coverage. They require visibility that is deep enough to provide actionable and credible next steps and something that can be managed at scale by large and distributed teams.

We listened to security leaders, and we developed Kodem to address the needs. Our platform, Kodem Dynamic, is the industry’s only software composition analysis platform that uses runtime intelligence to determine actual application risk. With Kodem, application security teams can tune in to the signals that matter, gain deep application understanding, and streamline remediation of the most critical issues.

Tuning in to the signals that matter

Tools that use static approaches to application security are noisy because they alert on every vulnerability scanned, whether or not the vulnerability is actually exploitable in real life. In fact, more than 90 percent of the alerts they generate are just false positives. This wastes developer time that could be better used developing new applications to support the business.

Kodem eliminates noise by tuning in to the signals that matter during runtime: Is a piece of code called during runtime? Does it leak data? Is it internet facing? Is the code exploitable? We reduce your organization’s overall risk exposure by prioritizing issues and directing developer resources efficiently. The technical approach of identifying issues during runtime eliminates false positives, since we observe apps as they execute real commands. This also allows security teams to find vulnerabilities in real time and to protect against zero-day attacks because Kodem alerts on observed action, not theoretical or potential activity.

Gaining deep application understanding

Modern applications are not isolated entities: They contain dependencies that have a significant impact on the overall security posture of the software. Dependency management is also essential to managing supply chain and other third-party risk, and allows the ability to predict the potential impact of changes.

Kodem analyzes how your application behaves during runtime and generates a Runtime Bill of Materials, or RBOM. The RBOM differs from the traditional SBOM by showing exactly which components and data are in use during runtime, and therefore what's truly vulnerable. The intelligence gathered through runtime improves performance, security, and compliance without the noise and false positives. This allows application security teams to monitor applications resources continuously and to chart risk posture over time, benchmark against industry standards, and assist with audits.

Streamlining Remediation

Teams that have deployed Kodem have seen coverage levels increase to 100 percent, with 80% decreases in mean time to repair and with zero false positives.

With better insight into applications, dependencies, and vulnerabilities, AppSec teams can triage effortlessly and be confident they are fixing the right problems. We help prioritize issues by providing step-by-step remediation instructions. And because the Kodem platform understands the interaction of the application with its dependencies and sub-dependencies, we can help you aggregate vulnerabilities to solve multiple issues with a single action, such as upgrading a base image to fix dozens of issues at once. With RBOM insights, you’ll be able to see which fixes will provide the most “bang for the buck” when it comes to improving application security posture.

With Kodem, developers can triage easily with suggested fixes and automated actions, dramatically reducing Mean Time To Repair. Teams can analyze impacts through data flow analysis, notification and reporting, and context enrichment. Remediation is automated with process orchestration, playbooks and integrations into incident response and custom workflow tools.

Each vulnerability listed provides a detailed explanation of the vulnerability, its potential impact in runtime, and the rationale for the recommended remediation steps. This approach not only helps the team implement the remediation effectively but also improves their understanding of application security.

Learn more

The Kodem platform is differentiated in the crowded landscape of application security because of its focus on runtime intelligence and streamlining remediation. We are committed to increasing application security by reducing noise.

See what we can do for your organization. Book a demo today.