Automated secure code review for web- applications

Sammanfattning: Carefully scanning and analysing web- applications is important, in order to avoid potential security vulnerabilities, or at least reduce them. Traditional code reviewing methods, such as manual code reviews, have various drawbacks when performed on large codebases. Therefore it is appropriate to explore automated code reviewing tools and study their performance and reliability. The literature study helped identify various prerequisites, which facilitated the application of automated code reviewing tools. In a case study, two static analysis tools, CodeQL and Semgrep, were used to find security risks in three open source web- applications with already known vulnerabilities. The result of the case study indicates that the automated code reviewing tools are much faster and more efficient than the manual reviewing, and they can detect security vulnerabilities to a certain acceptable degree. However there are vulnerabilities that do not follow a pattern and are difficult to be identified with these tools, and need human intelligence to be detected.