An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
ShiftLeft lives up to its name by putting code analysis and application-level security checkpoints into the hands of developers at the earliest possible stages of the SDLC, often before new code or modified features are even merged back to the trunk.
The essence of the problem here is that as modern software becomes more complex and distributed, the supporting codebase also grows too expansive and interdependent to scan for vulnerabilities during agile development cycles. Therefore, the data and time-intensive task of scanning millions of lines of code gets deferred to SecOps teams, with analysis and compliance checks arriving in pre-prod and post-deployment phases, when root causes are difficult to unpack and resolve.
ShiftLeft’s secret weapon against this app dev security test constraint is their underlying Code Property Graph, an ultra-fast cloud data structure underneath their code analysis tools that traces all information flowing through the system under development from source to sink.
Syntax, dependencies and controls are abstracted into an intermediate representation of code, which can be compared against security policies at high enough speed and detail to provide feedback in seconds, throwing exceptions and allowing developers to drill down to specific line-of-code concerns in line with their build process, rather than as a solely post-deployment activity.
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