PW.7 Review and/or Analyze Human-Readable Code to Identify Vulnerabilities and Verify Compliance with Security Requirements

Statement

Determine whether code review (a person looks directly at the code to find issues) and/or code analysis (tools are used to find issues in code, either in a fully automated way or in conjunction with a person) should be used, as defined by the organization.

Example 1:

Follow the organization’s policies or guidelines for when code review should be performed and how it should be conducted. This may include third-party code and reusable code modules written in-house.

Example 2:

Follow the organization’s policies or guidelines for when code analysis should be performed and how it should be conducted.

Example 3:

Choose code review and/or analysis methods based on the stage of the software.

Statement

Perform the code review and/or code analysis based on the organization’s secure coding standards, and record and triage all discovered issues and recommended remediations in the development team’s workflow or issue tracking system.

Example 1:

Perform peer review of code, and review any existing code review, analysis, or testing results as part of the peer review.

Example 2:

Use expert reviewers to check code for backdoors and other malicious content.

Example 3:

Use peer reviewing tools that facilitate the peer review process, and document all discussions and other feedback.

Example 4:

Use a static analysis tool to automatically check code for vulnerabilities and compliance with the organization’s secure coding standards with a human reviewing the issues reported by the tool and remediating them as necessary.

Example 5:

Use review checklists to verify that the code complies with the requirements.

Example 6:

Use automated tools to identify and remediate documented and verified unsafe software practices on a continuous basis as human-readable code is checked into the code repository.

Example 7:

Identify and document the root causes of discovered issues.

Example 8:

Document lessons learned from code review and analysis in a wiki that developers can access and search.