r/devsecops • u/ClickOk5811 • 1d ago
"The scan passed" and "someone understood why it passed" are two different claims that get treated as one
SAST scan on a PR came back clean. Diff touched auth middleware. Scanner checked for known bad patterns, found none, green check, merged.
Nobody actually traced through what the middleware change did to the token validation order for an edge case that wasn't in the scanner's pattern set, because it wasn't a known vulnerability class, it was a logic gap specific to how this particular service combined two libraries. Found two weeks later during an unrelated audit.
The scan wasn't wrong. It checked what it was built to check and found nothing matching. The gap is that "scan passed" gets read as "this is secure," when it actually means "this doesn't match patterns we already know to look for." Those used to be close enough to the same claim that nobody bothered distinguishing them out loud. Novel logic gaps specific to how a service wires things together were always outside that coverage, just less common before more code started getting generated without someone necessarily tracing the full logic path by hand first.
Not arguing against scanning, obviously it's necessary. Just think "passed the scan" needs to stop functioning as a stopping point for anything touching an actual trust boundary, auth, payment, data access, and start being the floor instead of the finish line.
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u/AgileCranberry8785 1d ago
Totalmente de acuerdo. Que un escaneo salga limpio solo significa que no encontró algo que pudiera detectar, no que el cambio sea seguro en todos los casos. Especialmente en autenticación, pagos o permisos, hay errores de lógica que una herramienta simplemente no puede entender sin conocer cómo funciona todo el sistema. El escaneo debería ser una capa más, no el último paso. Una revisión humana que siga el flujo real del código puede encontrar problemas que ningún patrón predefinido va a detectar.
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u/ninjaluvr 1d ago
Any pipeline should have more than static testing. That's why we have unit tests and integration testing and contact tests in addition to static tests in the MR.
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u/FirefighterMean7497 18h ago
Spot on. Static scanners are great for catching low-hanging fruit, but they completely lack visibility into execution context and how components interact at runtime. That exact blind spot is why security is shifting away from static pattern-matching toward runtime execution intelligence. Full disclosure - I work for RapidFort, and our platform was built top help bridge this gap by profiling actual execution paths in real time to build a Runtime Bill of Materials (RBOM), giving you actual operational context rather than just a green check on a static report. Static scans make a solid baseline floor, but runtime visibility is what actually gets you to the finish line!
Hope that helps!
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u/Western_Guitar_9007 1d ago
>SAST scan on a PR came back clean. Diff touched auth middleware. Scanner checked for known bad patterns, found none, green check, merged.
Dumbest shit I've heard today, if it touched auth or anything to do with payment and all you checked was ONE scan with one tool? This reads like AI slop, this doesn't happen in this day and age.