Owasp code review guide 2023 pdf

Code review is a vital part of the secure development lifecycle, as it helps identify and fix vulnerabilities, bugs, and design flaws before they become exploitable by attackers. However, code review can also be a challenging and time-consuming task, especially when dealing with large and complex codebases, multiple languages, frameworks, and libraries, and evolving threat scenarios. How can you make your code review process more efficient, effective, and secure? In this article, we will explore some of the most useful tools and resources for threat and vulnerability management in code review, and how they can help you improve your code quality, security, and compliance.

Top experts in this article

Selected by the community from 1 contribution. Learn more

Static analysis tools

Static analysis tools are software applications that analyze source code without executing it, helping to detect potential vulnerabilities, errors, code smells, and other issues. These tools can automate and standardize the code review process, reducing manual effort and human errors. Benefits of using static analysis tools include scanning code faster and more thoroughly than manual review, covering a wide range of security standards such as OWASP Top 10 and SANS Top 25, integrating with development tools and workflows like IDEs and CI/CD pipelines to provide feedback to developers, and generating reports to monitor code quality, security, and compliance metrics. Examples of static analysis tools include SonarQube, Fortify, Veracode, Checkmarx, and CodeQL.

• Arul Selvan Fractional Leadership (CTO/SVP/VP) | Cybersecurity | Cloud Computing | Software Development Services While static code analysis tools can identify potential issues early on, improve quality etc, it can flag code that is not problematic or have material impact with large number of issue counts which can lead to wasted time and resources on research and prioritization. Especially if your InfoSec team improperly uses these metrics and mandates engineering to fix all flagged issues can certainly lead to colossal failure. The effective way to make best use of static analysis tools is to have InfoSec and the engineering teams work closely and define the policy for scan so realistic and critical/important issues bubble up to be addressed immediately rather than trying to fix everything.

Dynamic analysis tools

Dynamic analysis tools are software applications that analyze your code while it is running, and simulate real-world attacks and user inputs to identify vulnerabilities, performance issues, and functional defects. These tools can be used to supplement static analysis tools and test code in different environments, configurations, and scenarios. Some of the benefits of dynamic analysis tools include uncovering vulnerabilities that are not detectable by static analysis tools such as runtime errors, memory leaks, buffer overflows, race conditions, and injection attacks. They can also assess the impact and severity of the vulnerabilities and provide recommendations and remediation steps to fix them. Furthermore, dynamic analysis tools can validate the functionality and usability of your code to ensure that it meets expected requirements and specifications. Examples of dynamic analysis tools include Burp Suite, ZAP, Nmap, Metasploit, and Selenium.

Code review guidelines

Code review guidelines are documents that define the best practices, standards, and procedures for conducting code review in your organization or project. By establishing a consistent and effective code review process, these guidelines can help ensure that your code meets the quality, security, and compliance criteria. Some of the benefits of using code review guidelines include providing a clear and common framework for code reviewers and developers, fostering a culture of collaboration and communication, enhancing transparency and accountability of the process, and facilitating tracking and auditing of code changes and issues. Examples of code review guidelines include Google's Code Review Guidelines, Mozilla's Code Review Guidelines, and OWASP's Code Review Guide.

Code review checklists

Code review checklists are useful tools for organizing and prioritizing code review tasks, and ensuring that all important aspects of code are covered. Using a checklist can streamline and simplify the code review process, preventing any critical issues from being missed or overlooked. Code review checklists offer several benefits, such as providing a structured and systematic approach for review, improving the quality and consistency of feedback, and reducing cognitive load and fatigue for reviewers. Examples of code review checklists include Microsoft's Code Review Checklist, GitHub's Code Review Checklist, and OWASP's Code Review Checklist.

Code review tools

Code review tools are software applications that can help automate and optimize your code review process, and leverage the power of collaboration, analytics, and automation. Benefits of using code review tools include integration with code repositories and development tools, a user-friendly and interactive interface for reviewers and developers, and advanced capabilities such as code analysis, code annotation, code suggestion, code quality metrics, code security scanning, and code compliance checking. Popular examples of code review tools are GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, CodeGuru, and Codacy.

Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

What is the Owasp code review manual?

OWASP Code Review Guide is a technical book written for those responsible for code reviews (management, developers, security professionals). The primary focus of this book has been divided into two main sections.

Does Owasp provide coding guidelines?

This guide provides coding practices that can be translated into coding requirements without the need for the developer to have an in depth understanding of security vulnerabilities and exploits.

What is the current version of Owasp testing guide?

[Version 4.2] - 2020-12-03.

Is Owasp still relevant?

With a new update yet to surface (we're expecting one sometime in the next couple of years), OWASP 2023 inevitably relies on the 2021 list, but make no mistake, these vulnerabilities are still very relevant and everyone in web development and security needs to be alert to the threats they pose.