AppSecUSA 2015

One challenging aspect of achieving software security is the struggle to catch up with the speed of development and deployment. We built Providence with the goal of preventing obvious bugs from ever being deployed into production.

Providence is a lightweight and scalable tool which finds bugs and anti-patterns of varying complexity from code commits, and we’ve used it to prevent vulnerabilities ranging from XSS, to access control issues, to XXE. It works by continuously monitoring and pulling commits from version control systems and scanning them for bugs with rules defined in plugins. Additional plugins are easy to create and deploy, which has allowed for quick reaction to new bugs or problems as they are discovered.

Providence is easily integrated with SDLC workflows or bug-tracking tools, and we will discuss how we have integrated it in-house in an unobtrusive manner. This model of addressing issues also provides relative immediacy of resolution; on average, potential problems found by Providence are resolved more quickly than other vulnerabilities because developers are presented the issues right after they commit the code, instead of weeks to months later.

We are currently in the process of open-sourcing Providence in order to share the tool with the DevOps/security community (or any interested parties). This talk will cover the internals of Providence, its engine and plugin architecture (including examples of plugins and their ease of creation), as well as its integration with our SDLC and the faster and more efficient responses we’ve achieved as a result. We’re continuing to build new plugins and features, and we’re excited see what ideas others may have in mind!