What Is SAST? How Static Application Security Testing Works

What is SAST?

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is an application security testing method that analyzes source code, bytecode, or binaries for security vulnerabilities without executing a program. SAST is a white-box testing method that doesn’t interact with the application externally. Instead, it examines the application source code to scan for vulnerabilities and malicious sections.

While some SAST tools use vulnerability databases, especially for detecting issues in third-party code, their core strength lies in analyzing source code for insecure coding patterns using techniques like dataflow and taint analysis. 

SAST isn’t the only tool that scans static assets. Linters, SCA scanners, and IaC analyzers also operate on static code but serve different purposes. The tool is often used early in the SDLC, but modern workflows also run SAST on existing codebases to catch regressions and legacy risks.

Because SAST helps development and security teams collaborate, it prevents future rewrites by improving safe code implementation. 

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How does SAST differ from DAST?

SAST and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) have fundamentally different approaches to application security testing, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Understanding how they differ helps teams build a more complete testing strategy. 

However, it’s not about SAST vs. DAST. These two approaches are actually complementary, not competing. Here’s what each is best suited for:

• SAST: Identifies issues during development

• DAST: Detects vulnerabilities that only appear when the application is live

When you combine SAST, DAST, and runtime protection with cloud context, you build a layered security posture that covers the entire application lifecycle, from early development through production.

Below is a breakdown of the two methods:

How does SAST work?

SAST tools analyze code without executing it. They scan source code, markup, bytecode, or binaries for patterns that match known security vulnerabilities, insecure configurations, or common coding flaws.

These tools rely on rulesets or vulnerability databases, which can be either local or cloud-based, to detect risky code patterns. For example, they might flag unsanitized inputs, insecure function calls, or outdated libraries based on language-specific rules.

Here’s a step-by-step overview of how SAST works in practice:

1. Initialization: Your team configures the SAST tool to scan code assets, including code files, configuration files (like YAML and XML), scripts, and markups.

2. Code parsing: The SAST tool parses the code and translates it into internal representations, such as syntax trees and control flow graphs. 

3. Pattern matching and rules application: The tool uses rulesets from vulnerability databases, like OWASP Top 10 and similar checks, to scan for secrets, outdated libraries, poor configuration settings, and more.

4. Contextual insights: A SAST tool analyzes your code and traces data flows to identify vulnerabilities and sensitive operation exposures.

5. Detection and reporting: The SAST tool provides severity ratings, remediation advice, and integrations with IDEs for the CI/CD pipeline.

6. Remediation and improvement: Your team reviews and fixes the flagged vulnerabilities within their IDE or CI/CD reports. Through continual improvement and by taking a DevSecOps shift-left approach, your team can regularly refine the SAST to reduce false positives and identify new types of threats.

With these steps in place, your SAST tool should provide the following capabilities:

Developer integrations: IDEs and CLIs

Organizations typically integrate SAST tools into two developer workflows:

• IDE extensions provide real-time feedback as your developers write code by surfacing security issues in-line before committing code.

• CLI tools can connect to version control systems, allowing for automatic scans to run during commits, pull requests, or builds.

The goal is to catch issues as early as possible. Ideally, SAST identifies problems before they reach version control, but it can still uncover security risks in existing code later in the pipeline.

Continuous scanning through CI/CD

By integrating SAST into your CI/CD pipelines to analyze custom code for security flaws, you can catch vulnerabilities early and consistently during development. Embedding SAST into development and CI/CD workflows also helps you create a continuous feedback loop that improves security posture without slowing down delivery.

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What challenges does SAST address?

SAST solutions address common security challenges that arise early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). By analyzing source code before applications run, SAST helps organizations:

• Identify code-level vulnerabilities early: SAST detects common coding flaws—such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and insecure API usage—before they reach production.

• Shift security left: By integrating into developer workflows and CI/CD pipelines, SAST enables teams to catch and fix security issues during development, which reduces both remediation costs and delays later in the process.

• Help enforce secure coding standards: SAST helps teams adhere to secure coding best practices and frameworks, like OWASP Top 10 and CWE/SANS, by automatically flagging violations in code.

• Reduce technical debt: Detecting security flaws early prevents the accumulation of insecure code, minimizes future rework, and makes applications easier to maintain.

• Support compliance requirements: Many security and privacy frameworks—including PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and HIPAA—mandate secure development practices. SAST provides a concrete way to demonstrate these efforts.

• Scale security reviews: SAST automates parts of the code review process (though it doesn’t replace it), allowing organizations to consistently enforce security checks across large codebases and fast-moving development teams.

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The benefits of SAST

When implemented effectively, SAST becomes a scalable, developer-friendly pillar of AppSec. SAST offers benefits that help you with the following:

• Catch vulnerabilities early when they’re easiest to fix: SAST helps teams find security issues during development, before code ever reaches production. The earlier you catch a vulnerability, the faster and less expensive it is to remediate, especially compared to fixing issues after deployment or following an incident.

• Give developers real-time, contextual feedback: With IDE and version control integrations, SAST surfaces issues the moment there’s insecure code. That way, developers can fix issues immediately without interrupting their workflow, learning secure coding practices organically, which reduces the need for rework and boosts security awareness over time.

• Enforce secure coding standards consistently: SAST allows organizations to bake security directly into the development process. It automatically flags violations of internal policies or external frameworks, such as OWASP Top 10 or CWE, so teams can maintain coding standards across every repo and contributor.

• Scale security through automation: SAST fits seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines, running automated scans on every commit, pull request, or build. This ensures continuous coverage across large, fast-moving engineering teams without the need for manual intervention.

• Strengthen compliance posture: Regulatory frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 often require evidence of secure development practices. SAST provides auditable proof of proactive risk management at the code level, helping teams stay compliant without slowing down. While it offers valuable evidence, SAST alone isn’t enough to demonstrate full compliance.

The limitations of SAST

While SAST is a powerful tool for identifying vulnerabilities early, it comes with trade-offs teams need to understand and plan for. Without the right tuning and context, it can create more noise than value. 

SAST’s limits include the following:

• Higher false positives: Because SAST analyzes code statically without runtime awareness, it often flags theoretical vulnerabilities that aren’t exploitable. Left unmanaged, false positives can overwhelm engineering teams, leading to alert fatigue or even tool abandonment.

• No visibility into runtime behavior: SAST tools can’t see how applications behave in production, so they won’t detect runtime-specific issues like race conditions, logic flaws, environment misconfigurations, or abuse of external services. This is why teams need to complement SAST with DAST tools or runtime protection.

• Ongoing tuning and rule maintenance: Using SAST isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Your team should review and refine rules over time to reduce noise, reflect codebase changes, and account for evolving attack patterns. Without ongoing attention, SAST tools risk becoming outdated or overly noisy.

• Limited understanding of context and impact: The typical SAST can’t distinguish between a vulnerable piece of code running in a locked-down internal service and one deployed to an internet-facing workload with access to sensitive data. Without cloud or runtime context, your SAST treats findings equally—even when the risk isn’t.

To get the most out of SAST, teams need to integrate it thoughtfully, tune it regularly, and combine its insights with tools that offer deeper runtime and cloud visibility.

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Best practices for running SAST effectively

To maximize the value of SAST, focus on these best practices across implementation, tuning, and team training.

Integrating SAST into the SDLC

To effectively integrate SAST into your SDLC, take a DevSecOps approach that embeds security into each phase of development. Scanning code continuously—from commit to build to pre-release—ensures security is part of the process from the start, which eliminates more taxing exposures and vulnerabilities after deployment. 

🛠️ Action step: Define and enforce security gates within the CI/CD pipeline to trigger scans on incremental scans or pull requests and automatically fail or block merges for critical issues. This prevents suspicious code from moving forward and gives developers immediate feedback. 

Evaluating and triaging SAST results

Once you’ve integrated your SAST tool into your dev lifecycle, create a clear process for triaging your SAST findings. This step helps you resolve the most significant threats and vulnerabilities first, with clear roles, protocols, and responsibilities in place. 

One key component of practical evaluation and triaging is reducing false alerts so minor issues don’t consume valuable time before your team can address the most critical threats. The right solution, combined with a contextual triage process, helps eliminate noise and keeps your focus on the most urgent and impactful events.

🛠️ Action step: Adopt a solution like Wiz Code that offers contextual prioritization, so your team can focus on the most severe and relevant vulnerabilities first. 

Developer training

Who handles vulnerabilities is just as important as which tool you use. As a result, you should train your developers and security team to create secure code and maintain secure practices before and after deployment. Each team member should be able to interpret SAST reports and remediate issues quickly. 

🛠️ Action step: Hold training sessions on how to use your SAST tool and run simulations to test for vulnerabilities in your code and security. 

Ruleset customization

Once you have the right tool, protocols, and training in place, customize your SAST to work with your tech stack and needs. Use rulesets and checks to identify unique patterns in your code that indicate vulnerabilities and eliminate noisy or irrelevant alerts that waste time and distract from the most severe vulnerabilities.

🛠️ Action step: Consider starting with “monitor” mode rules to study the scanner’s behavior, as well as helpful config files like GitLab’s sast-ruleset.toml to reduce noisy rules.

Must-have capabilities of SAST tools

Once you’re ready to choose a SAST tool, make sure it provides these key capabilities:

• Language and framework support: Your SAST tool should support the technology stack, programming languages, and frameworks your DevSecOps team uses, including common ones like Java, Python, C#, and JavaScript. 

• Vulnerability detection and rule coverage: A good SAST tool provides comprehensive rule coverage aligned with standards like OWASP Top 10, CWE/SANS Top 25, and PCI DSS, as well as flags issues like injection flaws, insecure configurations, and authentication vulnerabilities.

• Developer workflow integrations: Your SAST tool should integrate seamlessly within your development workflow. Key integrations include IDE plugins, CLI tools, version control integration, and CI/CD pipeline support. 

• Accurate reporting and guidance: Not all SAST tools provide in-depth contextual triage and prioritization. The solution you choose should offer crystal-clear reporting and remediation guidance to help you avoid alert fatigue and focus on the most pressing issues. 

• Scalability and performance: A SAST should be able to handle a large code base for incremental scanning, parallel processing, cloud-based processing, and baseline management. It should also have capabilities to help you secure and manage a complex, multi-cloud environment. 

What are the most popular open-source SAST tools?

For teams testing SAST or operating in OSS-heavy environments, these free open-source SAST tools offer strong coverage across common stacks:

While open-source tools are valuable, enterprise-grade SAST tools are particularly effective in cloud-native environments.

How you can leverage the Wiz-Checkmarx SAST integration

SAST helps teams catch code-level vulnerabilities early—but without runtime or deployment context, even critical findings can get lost in the noise. 

Traditional security tooling has long operated in silos since SAST focuses on static code analysis and CNAPPs focus on cloud infrastructure and runtime. But in today’s fast-moving, cloud-native environments, security teams need a unified view, not isolated results.

Wiz’s CNAPP integrates leading SAST capabilities, primarily through a partnership with Checkmarx, to provide a holistic security environment. Oron Noah, Wiz’s head of product extensibility and partnerships, commented on the significance of this kind of integration: “[...] we’re helping organizations safeguard their cloud infrastructure and applications with a unified and prioritized view into the cloud vulnerabilities that have the largest impact on their business.”

Here’s how Wiz and Checkmarx make the difference: 

Key features and capabilities

Wiz Code bridges the silo gap by ingesting SAST findings from tools like Semgrep and Checkmarx through the Wiz Integration platform. It then correlates these findings with real-time cloud data in Wiz’s Security Graph. This lets teams see which code-level vulnerabilities actually affect live workloads, are publicly exposed, or sit adjacent to sensitive data, allowing them to prioritize what matters.

Whether it’s a cookie misconfiguration Checkmarx detects or a logic flaw Semgrep finds, Wiz Code links those issues to the relevant cloud resources, deployment paths, and access identities. This context turns static alerts into actionable, risk-ranked insights. The result is a more complete approach to application security that connects code to cloud, reduces noise, and helps teams remediate the highest-impact risks faster.

Benefits of the integration

The Wiz-Checkmarx integration offers your DevSecOps team several key advantages:

• Full visibility: Get an end-to-end view of your code and cloud infrastructure by correlating Checkmarx’s findings with possible attack paths that Wiz identifies through your assets.

• Contextual security: Receive insights and alerts with context and priority levels that enable you to act quickly on the most critical needs and avoid alert fatigue. 

• Cloud-native security: Combine Checkmarx’s code findings with Wiz’s cloud risk analysis to break down silos and identify vulnerabilities across a unified cloud infrastructure. 

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