Scan Your Code for Vulnerabilities with Azure DevOps Tools
By: Saeed Ahmad
Tags: DevOps, Software Development, Programming, Azure, Security

Loopholes are everywhere. Software systems built by software engineers are no exception and we all know them as vulnerabilities. Usually, the severity increases at an exponential rate. So, if one vulnerability is not fixed it might lead to other vulnerabilities.

Ideally, we, as software engineers, want to develop software systems that are free of vulnerabilities but that’s not always the case. We do have vulnerabilities in real-world software.

To identify them, we need to scan our code by using different tools. These tools might be manual or can be integrated into a DevOps pipeline to automatically scan the code before deployment.

Today, we are going to review some of the tools that can be used for scanning the code in an Azure pipeline. Here they are.

1. WhiteSource Bolt

WhiteSource Bolt is a free extension for Azure DevOps, that can scan all of your projects for any vulnerabilities. It can detect the same in open source components and their licenses. A great advantage of using WhiteSource Bolt is that the tool also provides you the fixes for all detected vulnerabilities.

If you are an open-source enthusiast or building an enterprise-grade application, WhiteSource Bolt is for you. It can help you harness the full potential of your code without compromising on agility or security.

It provides support for most programming languages. Alongside this, it gives you the power to continuously track common vulnerabilities through their comprehensive vulnerability database maintained by their team.

The best thing about WhiteSource Bolt is that it integrates easily with your Azure DevOps’ continuous integration servers and can automatically identify all of the open-source components in your code, without actually scanning it.

Alongside that, it enables you to view real-time updates on outdated and vulnerable parts of your code and can generate up-to-date security reports, inventory, and licenses.

2. Sonar Cloud

SonarCloud is another leading online tool for code security that can be integrated into the Azure DevOps pipelines. SonarCloud supports nearly all major programming languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, C/C++, C#, VB .Net, and is free for open-source projects too.

However, If you have some closed source code then SonarCloud has a subscription fee to analyze private repositories.

With SonarCloud, you will have the advantage of automated detection of vulnerabilities and bugs across all pull requests and branches. It can also provide build tasks that you may integrate into your build definition.

However, SonarCloud gives detailed logs of all issues related to code, giving you the chance to fix them even before merging and deployment. When you are working at the project level, you will also get detailed tracking of the overall health of your application by the virtue of a dedicated widget.

3. AWS Toolkit

The AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps enables you to add tasks to easily build and release pipelines in Azure DevOps to seamlessly work with the vast array of AWS offerings that include AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service, and AWS CloudFormation.

With AWS Toolkit, you can also run commands using both AWS CLI and Windows PowerShell AWS Tools. It is available for free in the Azure DevOps category at the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Since AWS Toolkit is an open-source project, you can contribute to it, improve its docs or make a feature request too.

4. Ado Security Scanner

Ado Security Scanner is another open-source tool for code scanning in Azure DevOps pipelines by Microsoft DevLabs. This tool is specifically designed to assist organizations to manage secure Azure DevOps pipelines with the help of builtin ADO dashboard widgets through continuous scans and visualization of security issues and problems.

It assists you in keeping your Azure DevOps artifacts such as project/org settings, build/release configurations, agent pools, service connections, etc. configured securely. Also, you can run it in an Azure DevOps pipeline via a marketplace extension or maybe separately in a PowerShell console.

It manages different components of Azure DevOps and scans them like Builds, Releases, Organization, Service Connections, User, etc.

5. Beagle Security

Beagle Security is an intelligent, automated, and holistic tool to make your applications free of vulnerability-related problems and issues. It provides continuous penetration testing that requires some human supervision for organizations so that they can remain safe from cyber threats and exploits.

It finds the loopholes in your application before the real hackers do. The advantage of using Beagle Security is that it allows you to perform penetration testing of web applications with both SANS and OWASP standards.

You can also download the reports in PDF and other user-friendly formats. Alongside that, you get complete support from their team of experienced security researchers in the whole process.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, there are many tools that you can use for scanning your code for vulnerabilities. If you are looking for a comprehensive tool that is free and works well with both open source and closed source projects, then you can try WhiteSource Bolt or one of the other tools mentioned in this list.