Code Climate launches Security Monitor | Hacker News Reader

Code Climate launches Security Monitor

blog.codeclimate.com

26 pointssamdunne9 comments

Been using Code Climate for a long time; it's really fantastic. Bryan has done a great job finding the right things to point out that help improve our code quality.

The security stuff is pretty cool - it's really nice to have code-level audits that are continuous, ongoing, and automated. It won't replace the need for physical code review but it has already caught stuff our code reviews haven't.

I'm a huge fan of automation over manual labor and static code analysis is a great tool to help. For example, in our CI (CircleCI) we tie in different ruby gems (rails_best_practices, rcov, jshint, etc.) to help enforce code quality automagically. Violate one of our team-defined guidelines? The build will fail.

I often find it frustrating that teams introduce reams of documentation for code standards and then painstakingly hand-review code for adherence. Automate that and spend the rest of your time reviewing for things that can't be trivially automated (CodeClimate doesn't care about tabs v. spaces, of course)

"Automate that and spend the rest of your time reviewing for things that can't be trivially automated" - pretty much the mantra behind any successful security program. A false-positive/negative is usually fixed faster than any feature. <3

If anyone has any questions about Code Climate, Security Monitor, or how all this works, let me know.

Yeah could you explain a bit more in-depth how the security monitor works? What sort of vulnerabilities it catches etc.

PS. The site looks great, I am importing my first repository right now. Great job!

Absolutely. It's all static analysis -- so we're pulling all the information we can out of the codebase without running the code. Under the hood, it's based on the Brakeman open source tool: https://github.com/presidentbeef/brakeman

It looks for all the big issues (XSS, CSRF, SQLi). In many cases it means keeping track of where user input enters the system (e.g. params) and how it is eventually used. So if you interpolate a param into a string and then give that string to ActiveRecord, it will produce a warning with high confidence you're vulnerable to SQL injection.

We run it every 2-3 hours on your repo, then look for new things that come up and send out alerts.

More info about Security Monitor is here: https://codeclimate.com/security-monitor

Code Climate has been great for explaining tech debt and security to my clients. It shifts the conversation from begging for time to justifying a healthy dose of refactoring.

W00t my project gets a 4.0!

Is there something similar for other languages?

Having used static analysis security tools for other languages, no. Ignoring the fact that it is open source, it blows away every single other tool I have used in terms of speed, accuracy, and actionability.

I would _LOVE_ to be proven wrong on this one.

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