Many Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools struggle with false positives. They often report that a vulnerability is present, while, in reality, it does not exist. This inaccuracy weighs down the engineering team, as they spend productive hours triaging the false alarms. By setting a benchmark of false positives — a limit, above which is unacceptable — you can establish a point of reference or standard against which to measure the efficacy of your SAST tool.

Static application security testing (SAST) tools automatically scan the source code of an application. The goal is to identify vulnerabilities before deployment. SAST tools perform white-box testing, which involves analyzing the code based on inside knowledge of the application. SAST offers granularity in detecting vulnerabilities, providing an assessment down to the line of code.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is an effective and well-established application security testing technology. It allows developers to create high-quality and secure software that is resistant to the kinds of attacks that have grown more prevalent in recent years. However, the challenge with SAST is that it tends to produce a high number of false positives that waste the time of your engineering team. In this blog we take a look at SAST and the problem of false positives.