Bearer is a static application security testing (SAST) tool that scans your source code and analyzes your data flows to discover, filter and prioritize security risks and vulnerabilities leading to sensitive data exposures (PII, PHI, PD).
We provides built-in rules against a common set of security risks and vulnerabilities, known as OWASP Top 10. Here are some practical examples of what those rules look for:
- Leakage of sensitive data through cookies, internal loggers, third-party logging services, and into analytics environments.
- Usage of weak encryption libraries or misusage of encryption algorithms.
- Unencrypted incoming and outgoing communication (HTTP, FTP, SMTP) of sensitive information.
- Non-filtered user input.
- Hard-coded secrets and tokens
How do you detect sensitive data flows from the code?
When you run Bearer on your codebase, it discovers and classifies data by identifying patterns in the source code. Specifically, it looks for data types and matches against them. Most importantly, it never views the actual values (it just can’t)—but only the code itself.
Bearer assesses 120+ data types from sensitive data categories such as Personal Data (PD), Sensitive PD, Personally identifiable information (PII), and Personal Health Information (PHI). You can view the full list in the supported data types documentation.
In a nutshell, our static code analysis is performed on two levels: Analyzing class names, methods, functions, variables, properties, and attributes. It then ties those together to detected data structures. It does variable reconciliation etc. Analyzing data structure definitions files such as OpenAPI, SQL, GraphQL, and Protobuf.
Bearer then passes this over to the classification engine we built to support this very particular discovery process.
If you want to learn more, here is the longer explanation.
When and where to use Bearer?
We recommend running Bearer in your CI to check new PR automatically for security issues, so your development team has a direct feedback loop to fix issues immediately.
You can also integrate Bearer in your CD, though we recommend to only make it fail on high criticality issues only, as the impact for your organization might be important.
In addition, running Bearer on a scheduled job is a great way to keep track of your security posture and make sure new security issues are found even in projects with low activity.
Supported Language
Bearer currently supports JavaScript and Ruby and their associated most used frameworks and libraries. More languages will follow.
What makes Bearer different from any other SAST tools?
SAST tools are known to bury security teams and developers under hundreds of issues with little context and no sense of priority, often requiring security analysts to triage issues. Not Bearer.
The most vulnerable asset today is sensitive data, so we start there and prioritize application security risks and vulnerabilities by assessing sensitive data flows in your code to highlight what is urgent, and what is not.
We believe that by linking security issues with a clear business impact and risk of a data breach, or data leak, we can build better and more robust software, at no extra cost.
In addition, by being Open Source, extendable by design, and built with a great developer UX in mind, we bet you will see the difference for yourself.
How long does it take to scan my code? Is it fast?
It depends on the size of your applications. It can take as little as 20 seconds, up to a few minutes for an extremely large code base. We’ve added an internal caching layer that only looks at delta changes to allow quick, subsequent scans.
Running Bearer should not take more time than running your test suite.
What about false positives?
If you’re familiar with other SAST tools, false positives are always a possibility.
By using the most modern static code analysis techniques and providing a native filtering and prioritizing solution on the most important issues, we believe this problem won’t be a concern when using Bearer.
Changelog v1.3.1
- 166c7db fix: caching with multi-lang repos (#904)
