Shift-Left Testing: Definition and Importance in Cybersecurity

Quick Overview: Organizations are widely adopting a shift left testing approach to ensure quality, stable, and secure software applications. It plays a crucial role in cybersecurity by allowing organizations to shift security left. This means that security testing is performed early in the development process to reduce the chances of vulnerabilities and flaws that attackers can exploit to hack an application. Learn more about shift left testing in this article and its significance in enhancing application security.

Cybersecurity is a major concern for every organization today, regardless of their size. Vulnerabilities are among the major causes of cybersecurity risks. For example, unpatched vulnerabilities are the primary reasons for most cyberattacks faced by companies in the USA, as per Statista.

Preventing these vulnerabilities requires a robust testing approach that can effectively uncover weaknesses in applications to reduce the risks of cyberattacks. Fixing security issues after an application is built is rather costly and takes many resources. Plus, there is another downside: it can slow down or halt development.

The shift left approach has emerged as a promising solution for organizations in this aspect. It means that security must be included in the early stages of development. It helps predict security needs and minimizes any issues in later stages.

Shift-left testing helps early security audits detect and remediate vulnerabilities sooner in the development process. Developers can perform vulnerability scanning during development using various techniques and discover loopholes before applications are shipped.

Consequently, the chances of vulnerabilities are minimal, resulting in more secure applications.

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An Overview of Shift Left Testing in Cybersecurity

There is so much hype around shift-left testing these days. It is trumpeted as an efficient approach to build top-quality and stable software applications. But what is the shift left testing in reality? In a nutshell, it is a shift in mindset rather than a methodology. It states that testing should start as early and frequently as possible instead of conducting it at the end of an SLDC.

Traditionally, testers conduct testing at the end of an SDLC to discover potential bugs, security loopholes, and flaws that can impact the performance, security, and integrity of an application. However, the shift left approach to testing requires it from the beginning of an SDLC.

So, the crux is that the shift left approach pushes testing to the initial stages for analyzing applications as early as possible. It flags issues early to mitigate potential risks before any problem arises. This approach is quite beneficial from a security point of view.

In the wake of rising cybersecurity incidents, organizations need to adopt a robust method for testing their applications to mitigate potential cybersecurity risks. However, testing in the later stages of an SDLC doesn’t solve this problem efficiently.

Shift-left security testing can help organizations to effectively detect security issues as soon as possible and minimize the risks of cyber threats. Early testing helps detect potential security vulnerabilities before a software application reaches production.

Consequently, organizations can develop secure applications that are protected against a myriad of security risks like cross-site scripting, unauthorized access, session hijacking, and more. These types of risks arise due to vulnerabilities present in applications.

With the shift left security testing, organizations can increase the collaboration between developers and security teams to reduce the chances of security loopholes.

How Does Shift Left Testing Help Organizations?

Testing is a pivotal process that ensures the best quality and risk-free software. It helps discover flaws, misconfigurations, and loopholes that can threaten the integrity, availability, and security of a software application. However, traditional testing approaches focus on this aspect at later stages of the SDLC.

Consequently, bugs and errors are not efficiently intercepted as the application moves through the development lifecycle. This leads to a low-quality application with bug-ridden code. Plus, it takes a lot of resources in terms of time, effort, and cost to fix the issues when the application is in production.

Here, shift left software testing comes to the rescue as it emphasizes testing early in the development process instead of performing it at the end. There are many benefits of shifting software testing left as follows.

Cost Savings

The focus on testing early in the shift left approach offers cost savings. It is cheaper to fix bugs with automated tests during development than if they are found and fixed after an application is in the production environment.

Avoid Delays

Testing alongside development can help avoid delays in deployment. Fixes at the end of the development cycle can extend the deployment schedule, resulting in delayed time-to-market. However, early testing can prevent the delay.

Early Detection

Early detection is early prevention. The shift left methodology for testing helps detect bugs and security flaws early to prevent production problems. Detecting flaws and bugs early can save many resources and time. It helps avoid downtime and waste of resources.

Quality

As bugs and flaws are found early and remediated on time, the application is likely to be of higher quality. It helps streamline the collaboration between the developers, testers, IT operations, and security teams, resulting in better product quality.

Better Knowledge

Testing performed on the developers’ end will enable them to learn from their errors and understand the best practices to create quality applications. Shifting testing left becomes intrinsic to development, which makes it a habit for developers.

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Why is Shift-Left Security Trending?

Did you know that the average cost of a data breach is $4.88 million today? Isn’t it alarming data for organizations? Obviously, no organization wants unexpected expenses, and we are talking about losing millions of dollars in data breaches, which is truly a nightmare.

But to overcome this problem, you must think about why data breaches occur in the first place. Well, poor security practices are surely a key reason for such incidents, but they aren’t the only ones. Even if you created the best security posture for your applications, it can be bypassed if there is a vulnerability.

Traditional testing approaches took security audits at the end of a development cycle. If the tests are passed, the application moves to production or goes back to developers if any fail. It results in long deployment delays.

Plus, testing an application at the end of its development cycle doesn’t effectively capture all the security flaws and issues present in it. Therefore, shifting security testing left has come out as a feasible solution to these problems.

Shift left security is a testing method that emphasizes conducting security audits as early as possible to identify and fix loopholes before they become a huge and costly problem. However, it doesn’t neglect testing at the end. It advocates not limiting testing to only one stage.

It emphasizes that testing should also be a part of the development process, and developers should test often. The key advantage of this approach is that it helps discover any security flaw early before an application goes into production and a bad actor finds it.

It also helps avoid deployment delays because the more the developers test before pushing their code, the less it is likely to have vulnerabilities. So, it will reduce the time spent on testing.

Technologies Driving the Shift Left Approach

The benefits of shift-left testing for cybersecurity can be availed of by a myriad of tools and technologies that help evaluate software applications, as mentioned below.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

It provides insights into the threat landscape by scanning applications in runtime before deployment. It scans for security threats “outside-in” and discovers vulnerabilities with simulated attacks. A DAST tool can automate the process and help you uncover a myriad of vulnerabilities. It can identify security vulnerabilities that cannot be found in a static state during development.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

SAST evaluates an application’s code to discover weaknesses and flaws that can make it vulnerable to cyberattacks. Often, SAST tools are integrated into developers’ environments to get instant feedback on security risks and fix them with coding best practices.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

SCA analyzes software components like dependencies, open-source libraries, and third-party integrations for vulnerabilities. It extends the coverage of SAST by detecting security vulnerabilities that cannot be found with static code analysis.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

It helps evaluate cloud environments for potential misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions can recommend the best practices to ensure robust security, and they can even automatically apply these practices.

Runtime Application Self Protection (RASP)

RASP runs simultaneously with an application to monitor its behavior in production. It notifies any unauthorized actions or automatically blocks them. It offers real-time visibility into potential application security threats.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

It is a firewall for a particular application to monitor traffic and detect anomalies. WAF is also helpful to detect vulnerabilities and prevent malicious attacks like DoS or DDoS. It can block many attack vectors by analyzing incoming traffic.

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Shift Left Security with ZeroThreat

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Developers can combine our tool with their existing CI/CD toolchains to detect, triage, and remediate vulnerabilities during development. Setting up ZeroThreat is painless with zero configuration and scanning takes only a few minutes due to 5X faster scanning.

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