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Author: Mitch Ashley

  • DevSecOps for Security and Safety-Critical Software Development

    DevSecOps for Security and Safety-Critical Software Development

    One of the most effective software development practices for safety-critical software is DevSecOps. Put simply, DevSecOps automates development and security processes to ensure the security and reliability of software. Here, we explain what you need to know about DevSecOps.

    What You Need to Know About DevSecOps Automation

    DevSecOps is a software development practice that automates and shortens feedback times to ensure secure software development. In general, safety-critical software development requires compliance with industry-specific, functional safety standards — each of which has its own set of core requirements to help you develop software that is safe and secure. While each standard’s guidance is unique, they all require a controlled, reliable, repeatable and automated set of delivery processes to demonstrate compliance. DevSecOps provides just that.

    How DevSecOps Automation Works With CI/CD Pipelines

    An important part of DevSecOps automation are CI/CD pipelines. In general, CI improves the quality of your codebase by breaking up tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks as well as by performing frequent code integrations. By using CI, you are able to identify problems sooner, easily encourage more modular changes to your code, automate tasks and detect issues quickly.

    The Benefits of DevSecOps Automation

    While you and your team may experience different benefits of DevSecOps, in general, the most common benefits of DevSecOps include the following:

    • Lowered development and operation costs. · Shortened development cycles.
    • Increased release pace.
    • Improved detection of software vulnerabilities and errors.
    • Reduced amount of failures and rollbacks associated with deployment.
    • Reduced amount of time to recover from a software development failure.

    What DevSecOps Automation Tools Should You Use?

    By using a DevSecOps tool to automate your processes, you ensure your software development process is free from software vulnerabilities and errors. The most common DevSecOps tool is a static application security testing (SAST) tool. A SAST tool automates your vulnerability detection processes, eliminates identified vulnerabilities, increases the pace of development and reduces the amount of disruption to your software development process.

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/devsecops-automation-safety-critical-software

  • Klocwork Is the Ideal Static Analysis Tool for DevOps

    Klocwork Is the Ideal Static Analysis Tool for DevOps

    Klocwork identifies software security, quality and reliability issues for C, C++, C# and Java helps to enforce compliance with standards. Its in-depth, accurate and precise analysis results have earned Klocwork the trust of industry leaders across a variety of industries. However, Klocwork is more than just a static code analysis tool; it’s also a static application security testing (SAST) tool.

    Find Security Vulnerabilities with SAST

    Klocwork SAST for DevOps and DevSecOps helps you to identify security vulnerabilities, which enables you to find and fix security issues earlier on in development. In addition, Klocwork helps you to ensure compliance with internationally recognized security standards.

    Differential Analysis

    Klocwork is one of the few static code analysis tools that uses differential analysis. This type of analysis enables Klocwork to provide you with shortest possible analysis times for the new and changed code—while maintaining the accuracy and detail of the analysis data.

    CI/CD Pipeline Support

    Built for enterprise DevOps, Klocwork scales to projects of any size, integrates with large complex environments and a wide range of developer tools, and provides control, collaboration and reporting. In addition, it integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines to automate continuous compliance. This lowers cloud computing costs, as there are no idle instances waiting for the next analysis.

    Containerized Build Support

    Klocwork provides Containerized Build support for machine provisioning and cloud computing systems, including AWS, Azure and OpenStack. This provides the maximum flexibility and opportunity to use internal or external cloud services for code analysis.

    Control, Collaborate and Report

    The Klocwork Portal dashboard is a centralized store of analysis data, trends, metrics and configurations for codebases across the organization—accessed through a web browser. The dashboard is highly customizable, enabling your developers, managers and other stakeholders.

    Provide Your Team with Every Advantage — Provide Them with Klocwork

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/datasheet-klocwork-static-analysis-tool-for-devops-web.pdf

  • Software Safety vs. Security: What’s the Difference?

    Software Safety vs. Security: What’s the Difference?

    When developing software, you must ensure that that it is both safe and secure. But what is the difference between your code being safe, and your code being secure? Here, we discuss the differences between the two, and explain why you need to ensure that your software is both safe and secure.

    The Difference Between Safety and Security

    The most significant difference between safety and security is this: Safety means no harm is caused — deliberate or otherwise — while security means no deliberate harm is caused — at all. However, there are other important differences.

    Code Security Prevents Cyberattacks: Code security is about preventing unwanted or illegal activity in your software.

    Code Safety Ensures Reliability: Code safety is a broad term that indicates whether software is reliable and safe to use.

    Security Helps Achieve Safety: Security is a means to achieve safety.

    How Coding Standards — Like MISRA — Drive Software Safety

    Safety is essential to industries, such as automotive, rail, medical device, and aerospace and defense. For years, MISR coding guidelines have helped developers in those industries keep high-reliability systems safe. In addition, the MISRA C:2012 Amendment 1 outlines security measures to help you identify and avoid common security vulnerabilities in your software systems. While coding standards don’t provide you with foolproof security, they do help you to ensure that your code is reliable and maintains high quality.

    How to Enforce Software Safety and Security

    The most effective way to enforce software safety and security is to use a static code analysis tool. In fact, MISRA recommends that you use a static code analysis tool to ensure the highest degree of compliance. By using a static code analysis tool, you’re able to identify software safety and security vulnerabilities, errors and bugs. This enables you to fix these potential weaknesses before they become dangerous and damaging. What’s more, a static code analyzer leads to more secure, safer software.

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/software-safety-vs-security-whats-different

  • What Is DISA STIG?

    What Is DISA STIG?

    You need to ensure that your software is secure and safeguarded from security vulnerabilities. DISA STIGs help you ensure the security of your software. Read on to learn how.

    What You Need to Know About DISA STIG

    Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) provides technical guides referred to as Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). DISA is a part of the Department of Defense and it was created to provide guidance for the IT and technological aspects of organizing, delivering and managing defense-related information. The most prominent of these are the STIG guidelines which outline how an organization should handle and manage security software and systems.

    What’s Included in the Complete STIG Security List

    Each STIG provides you with technical guidance to secure information systems and software that might otherwise be vulnerable to security issues.

    The DoD regularly updates STIGs to ensure that you are able to complete the following three actions:

    1. Configure hardware and software properly.
    2. Implement security protocols.
    3. Organize training processes.

    By using a STIG, you are able to identify potential security vulnerabilities in your code. DISA STIG Compliance Levels While each STIG is unique, every DISA STIG has three compliance levels, which are referred to as “categories.” The categories indicate the severity of the risk of failing to address a particular security vulnerability and weakness. From the most to least severe, the categories are:

    Category I: Category I refers to any vulnerability that will directly and immediately result in loss of confidentiality, availability, or integrity. In addition, these vulnerabilities can enable cybercriminals unauthorized access to classified data or facilities, which can lead to DoS attack. Category I risks are the most severe as they can result in loss of life, damage to facilities or mission familiar.

    Category II: Category II vulnerabilities are any vulnerabilities that can result in the loss of confidentiality, availability or integrity.

    Category III: Category III vulnerabilities are any vulnerabilities that degrades measures to protect against the loss of confidentiality, availability, or integrity.

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/what-is-DISA-STIG

  • Guide for Software Development & Software Security

    Guide for Software Development & Software Security

    In order to ensure an efficient, secure and successful software development project, there are many factors that you and your team must consider when starting a new project. The most common and pertinent considerations for many include defining the requirements of the project, selecting the correct processes for each stage of the software development project, selecting the right software development tools and ensuring the proper practices are implemented for software security.

    As meeting each of those considerations for an effective software development project can be a daunting and time-consuming challenge, we recommend you follow this step-by-step guide that will help walk you through how to organize a secure and successful project.

    Understand Your Software Development Project Requirements

    As you begin your software development project, there are several details that you must complete to help you better understand your software development project requirements.

    • Outline the project
    • Define the project vision
    • Identify compliance requirements
    • Select a flexible programming language
    • Develop a code design
    • Establish code architecture

    By completing the above tasks, you are able to create a reliable and secure framework for your software development project.

    How to Define Your Software Development Process

    As your development process will be unique to the needs and requirements of your software development project, we recommend that you consider including the following details into your process:

    • Identify what software security best practices will need to be enforced
    • Align on a development methodology
    • Organize your environment setup
    • Use repository tools
    • Enforce software security with secure coding practices
    • Incorporate checks into your development pipeline
    • Have a definition of “done” for your software development project tasks and features
    • Encourage feedback and communication

    Including the above details into your software development process helps to ensure software security as well as increase the success of your software development project.

    How to Choose the Right Software Security Tools for your Software Development Project

    One of the most important parts of your software development project is to choose the right tools. With the right tools, you are able to standardize your project and enable your entire team to work together more efficiently and effectively. Regardless of what the specifics of your software development may be, we recommend that your toolset includes:

    • Version control system
    • Static code analyzer
    • Application lifecycle management tool

    These tools help to ensure that your project is well-organized; your software reliable, compliant and high quality; and that software security is enforced.

    How to Set Up DevSecOps for Your Software Development Project

    DevSecOps is essential for efficient and secure software development, as it can help your team:

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/software-development-and-software-security

  • How to Improve Code Quality, Efficiently, with Static Analysis

    How to Improve Code Quality, Efficiently, with Static Analysis

    As hard as they try, no programmer is perfect. Testing and manual code reviews cannot find every problem in their code, so software vulnerabilities and bugs persist.

    Unfortunately, the amount of software errors will only continue to grow as your systems get larger and more complex. Which begs the question: How can you find all of the critical problems present in your code while still releasing a quality product on time? Simple: Use a static code analysis tool.

    In this webinar, we will discuss the following topics:
    1. Why bug-free software is difficult to achieve.
    2. Why automated software tools are the most effective solution.
    3. How safe, secure and reliable software can be achieved at lower costs.
    4. How static code analysis and manual code reviews can work together.

    In addition, we will also provide examples of software vulnerabilities that are easily missed by manual code reviews.

     

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/webinars/qac/how-improve-quality-static-code-analysis

  • Add Static Code Analysis to Your CI/CD Pipelines

    Add Static Code Analysis to Your CI/CD Pipelines

    An efficient CI/CD pipeline is necessary for accelerating software delivery without sacrificing quality, and a static code analysis tool is an essential part of that pipeline. A static code analysis tool inspects your code as it is being written to identify defects, vulnerabilities and compliance issues — without having to run the program. What’s more, a static code analysis tool helps to ensure that your embedded code is secure, reliable and compliant. In this webinar, we will discuss how you can effectively add a static code analysis tool to your DevOps process.

     

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/webinars/kw/add-static-code-analysis-to-ci-cd-pipelines

  • Continuous Integration Overview

    Continuous Integration Overview

    To improve the efficiency of your software development workflow, you should use continuous integration. We’ll explain what continuous integration is, why it’s important and how it can help you.

    Continuous Integration in DevOps

    Continuous integration is the automation of building and testing code each time a change is made in the codebase, and then committing the code back to your central code repository. For each new code commit that is made, an automated build and test process — which is also called a “pipeline”— is triggered. This trigger then generates a report on any defects found during code compilation and/or testing.

    The Benefits of Continuous Integration

    The benefits of using continuous integration include the following:

    • Easier to fix software vulnerabilities, errors and bugs.
    • Minimizing the amount of potential risk to your software development project.
    • Increasing the quality of your software.
    • Increasing the productivity of your team members.

    While the above list is not comprehensive, it does represent the most common benefits for software development teams.

    The Difference Between Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

    While both continuous integration and continuous delivery are software development processes, there is quite a bit of differences between them. To put it simply, continuous integration is used during the build and test phase, while continuous delivery is used once changes have been committed. Essentially, the aim of continuous delivery is to always have validated and verified code in your code repository, also known as a version control system.

    Why Continuous Integration Is Important

    Continuous integration is important because it enables you and your team to avoid common development pitfalls. In addition, a continuous integration pipeline ensures that every change is integrated, tested and verified.

    How Static Code Analysis Complements Continuous Integration

    One of the most effective practices you can adopt to improve your continuous integration development process is to use a static code analysis tool. The tool provides you with fast, reliable feedback on submitted code changes — enabling you to identify vulnerabilities and errors earlier in your development process. In addition, you are able to use quality gates with  static analysis tool to prevent those issues from entering your main code stream.

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/what-is-continuous-integration

  • CI/CD Best Practices for Software Development

    CI/CD Best Practices for Software Development

    Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are popular software development practices for automation and shortening feedback times. However, set up improperly, your CI/CD pipelines could instead cause delays in development. For that reason, review  CI/CD best practices to ensure that your pipelines are effective and efficient.

    What You Need to Know About Continuous Integration

    Continuous integration is the practice of automating the build and testing of code every time a change is made and committing that code back to a central repository. One of the fundamental cornerstones of continuous integration is that it encourages breaking up development tasks into small bite-sized pieces that can be performed frequently by every developer on the team.

    The Benefits of Continuous Integration

    There are four key benefits of continuous integration:

    • Easier Bug Fixes
    • Reduced Project Risk
    • Improved Software Quality
    • Higher Productivity

    What You Need to Know About Continuous Delivery

    Continuous delivery is a software development practice that enables continuous process and software improvement through automation. Without continuous delivery, you would have to manually develop, test, and deploy code—which can often take months. That is why continuous delivery is important as it can save you and your team a great deal of time.

    The Benefits of Continuous Delivery There are four key benefits of continuous delivery:

    1. Streamlining Workflows
    2. Lowering Staffing Costs
    3. Improving Operational Confidence
    4. Enhancing Teamwork

    Static Code Analysis Complements Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

    Static code analysis is a natural addition to any continuous integration development process. Done correctly, static code analysis adds the possibility for almost immediate feedback of new coding issues, specific to the branch or commit containing them.

    In addition, a static code analysis tool can provide your CI/CD pipeline with the following benefits:

    1. Detection of common security vulnerabilities, potential runtime errors, and other general coding errors.
    2. Compliance with safety-related coding standards, which includes MISRA and AUTOSAR.
    3. Enforce your coding guidelines or naming conventions along with your maintainability requirements.

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/resources/kw/ci-cd-best-practices-software-development

  • What Is a CI/CD Pipeline? How to Improve CI/CD

    What Is a CI/CD Pipeline? How to Improve CI/CD

    The most effective way to ensure that your CI/CD pipeline is efficient is to use the right tool, like a static code analyzer. Here we explain what is a CI/CD pipeline and how a static analysis tool can help.

    What You Need to Know About CI/CD Pipelines

    The easiest way to understand a CI/CD pipeline is by understanding its individual components. Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of merging all of the working copies of code together into a shared mainline, while continuous delivery (CD) is the regular delivery of software functionalities.

    With a CI/CD pipeline, you can expect the following benefits:

    • Identifying software issues, errors, and bugs earlier in the software development process. This enables you and your team to fix these issues before they become too damaging and costly.
    • Reducing the amount of potential risk to your development process and your software.
    • Improving the quality and reliability of your software.

    Without having to run the program, a static analysis tool inspects your source code to identify defects, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues.

    This makes it invaluable to any CI/CD pipeline, as it helps with:

    • Detecting security vulnerabilities, runtime errors, and other software issues.
    • Enforcing compliance with safety-related coding standards as well as with company- or project-wide coding guidelines.

    How You Can Improve Your CI/CD Pipeline With a Static Analysis Tool

    With a static analysis tool, you are able to:

    • Ensure that your software is secure, reliable, and high quality.
    • Reduce the cost of identifying and fixing software defects and vulnerabilities earlier in your development process.
    • Enforce software coding standards to help you more easily prove compliance.
    • Improve the productivity, testing efforts, and pace of your software delivery efforts.
    • Report on the quality of your software over time and across multiple product versions.

    To read more, please visit: https://www.perforce.com/blog/kw/static-analysis-ci-cd-pipelines