Using the principles and technology of code ownership improves efficiency in vulnerability remediation.

At EchoLayer, we understand the pain faced by security teams in their quest to fortify code against threats. Our goal is to empower security teams, engineers, and tech team leaders to overcome these challenges and drive accountability within their organizations to improve mean time to remediation.

Blockers to getting vulnerabilities closed

In application security some of the obstacles that hinder fast and effective vulnerability resolution are:

1. Disconnected Security and Engineering Teams: Without a clear definition of ownership, security teams can struggle to ensure that discovered vulnerabilities are routed to the responsible engineering team for remediation. This can also hinder collaboration, causing delays and hampering productivity.

2. Incorrect assignment causing needless friction: When vulnerability scanners throw critical errors security teams rush to implement a fix. Unfortunately, without a detailed understanding of the codebase they can sometimes find, after a fire drill with engineering counter parts, that it was low-risk as the application isn't connected to the internet for example. This causes needless friction with their colleagues in engineering and degrades trust.

3. The Burden of Identification: Security teams waste valuable time grappling with the complexities of determining who is responsible for fixing a security issue. This time could be better spent in many ways.

A Roadmap to Working with Code Ownership

To get the benefits of code ownership, follow these steps:

1. Define Ownership Roles: Assign code ownership to engineers or teams based on their expertise. Depending on your company's size, even starting with ownership assignment at a repository level can improve your mean time to remediation. To get more advanced you can add a CODEOWNERS file to each repository and define ownership to a file level. If needed, EchoLayer's AI algorithms can assist you in getting this done.

2. Adopt Seamless Collaboration: Hop into Slack with your engineering colleagues and be a helpful resource to them for prioritizing security issues with their long lists of feature work and bug fixes. Supporting each other and understanding engineering goals and team commitments will go a long way when critical fixes come along and you need to move fast.

3. Amplify Accountability: Regularly recognize individual or team efforts, fostering a culture of accountability and motivating engineers to prioritize security.

4. Shift Security Left: Since you already stay up to date with the latest security best practices and emerging threats, why not host a lunch and learn with your engineering colleagues? This will help build a culture of security minded teams and engineers can help you shift security left with CI/CD pipeline improvements and other techniques. Make sure you appreciate their efforts and continue to build that rapport.

5. Improve Security with Regular Code Reviews: Frequent code reviews with proper code owners greatly improves reliability. Collaborate with code owners to identify and address vulnerabilities, strengthening your security posture and stop threats before they can manifest.