The 2024 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report revealed that 74% of audited codebases contained high-risk vulnerabilities, up from 48% in 2022. Security flaws have intensified across the board with broader open-source software adoptions and the rise of AI coding—and the risks cut deeper.
Code security closes that gap early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) by detecting and remediating these vulnerabilities before they reach production and trigger costly, disruptive incidents. This guide will explore what secure code is, its pros and cons, and best practices for building robust code security.
What Is Code Security?
Code security is exactly what it sounds like: the practice of securing code over the entire SDLC, building protection into your software from the beginning and weaving security into the code itself. In practical terms, this looks like using secure coding habits, reviews, and automated scans so vulnerabilities don’t slip into production.
Instead of patching issues after deployment, teams can catch them early in the development lifecycle. This strengthens code safety and reduces the chances of exploitation or data loss.
In every stage of development, dev teams should implement code security. It extends across key areas, such as infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates, application code, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Then, by combining static and dynamic testing with software composition analysis (SCA), developers can see risks before attackers ever find them.
The result? Fewer surprises in production and a stronger, more resilient software delivery process.
What Are the Benefits of Code Security?
Building secure software isn't just about avoiding breaches. Secure software saves time, protects your business operations, and gives developers the confidence to dream up stronger, safer code. Here are four specific ways that code security strengthens your entire development process.
Protects Your Digital Assets
Strong code security keeps your most valuable assets—your applications, customer data, and intellectual property—out of an attacker’s reach. By scanning and fixing vulnerabilities before deployment, you reduce the risk of breaches that could expose sensitive information or halt business operations.
Reduces Time and Resources Spent on Vulnerabilities
Catching vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle is faster, cheaper, and far less disruptive than addressing them after release. When developers fix issues at the source, they avoid long remediation cycles and downtime that comes with production incidents. A mature code security process saves time and effort, freeing teams to focus on innovation.
Improves Runtime Security
While the goal of software code security is to prevent risks before deployment, its impact continues into runtime. Well-secured code reduces the number of active vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit, cutting mean time to resolution. The result is a cleaner user experience and fewer emergency patches.
Supports Compliance and Audit Readiness
Many industry security frameworks and regulations, from ISO 27001 to SOC 2, require proof of security integration throughout the software lifecycle. Starting from a secure code base simplifies compliance and audit preparation because it continuously validates configurations and prioritizes patches for known vulnerabilities.
Code Security Challenges
Security doesn’t come automatically, even in the best processes. Each sprint changes your codebase, dependencies, and pipelines, so your team needs steady guardrails to keep risk in check. Here are some challenges teams run into most and why they persist.
Overwhelming Numbers of Tools
Tool sprawl creates overlapping alerts and noise in third-party integrations. Misconfigured apps with broad scopes expose access to too many people, and developers start to ignore dashboards that don't map to their workflow. Make sure every tool in your stack has a purpose, wire tools into CI/CD, and enforce least privileges on integrations.
Keeping Up With Evolving Threats
Coders are constantly designing new techniques, but so are hackers—especially as AI’s technical scope grows. Maintainer takeovers, dependency hijacks, and backdoors planted in dependencies or build pipelines can bypass basic checks. Staying up-to-date with new threats takes time, from hardening CI/CD to tracing runtime issues back to code. Prioritize separating exploitable signals from noise so risks don't move further down the pipeline.
Balancing Speed With Shipping Pressures
Tight deadlines can push teams to cut corners, and retrofits are more expensive than doing it right the first time. Plan time for encryption, access controls, and reviews during design to avoid expensive rework later, and build security into the pipeline so shipping secure code is default.
Weak Cultures of Security Awareness
Security habits don’t form on their own—they grow from clear expectations, steady practice, and fast feedback under visible leadership. Unless you tighten and maintain strong security habits with your team, they might overlook small checks that ultimately push sensitive data to public repositories, for example. Default settings in source control platforms can also leave secrets exposed. Training, guardrails in pull requests, and clear task ownership make security part of everyday development.
3 Types of Code Security
Code isn’t secured in just one place: Controls should be layered across definitions, source, and the delivery path. Anchor your program’s security in the following three major categories.
1. IaC Security
Scan Terraform, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes manifest files before they reach staging. One mistake in an IaC template can multiply into thousands of misconfigurations at runtime, so bake guardrails into the build pipeline and dev tools so infrastructure starts and stays as secure as possible.
2. Secrets Detection
Treat hardcoded keys, tokens, and passwords like critical bugs. Run secrets scanning on every push and pull request, and search repository history to root out older exposures you might’ve missed. Attackers discover exposed secrets in public repositories fast, so catch and revoke them before they become incidents.
3. Software Supply Chain Security
Harden the path from code to cloud, including version control, package registries, and artifact stores. Lock down branch protections and access controls and watch for dependencies so a tainted library or unverified pipeline change can’t ship as “trusted.”
Code Security Best Practices
Make these safe coding habits part of every pull request and build. From code scanning to manual checks, these safe coding habits embed security in daily practice.
Scanning Code With SAST and SCA
Run static application security testing (SAST) and SCA on open-source dependencies in CI for every change. These scans detect security vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS).
These scans identify where you can gate merges based on potential severity and exploitability, surface findings where developers work, and fix insecure code at the source to avoid expensive retrofits. By pairing scans with policy checks for IaC and containers, your team can keep insecure configurations from reaching staging.
Encrypt and Hide Data
Hiding sensitive information from those without the proper permissions limits protects confidentiality and your servers. Keep secrets out of code and logs and regularly rotate them. Encrypt data in transit with Transport Layer Security (TLS) and at rest (like AES-256), manage keys with a hardened service such as Key Management Service (KMS) or Vault, and store passwords with modern salted hashing using Argon2 or bcrypt.
Implement the Shift Left Approach
Shift left approaches move security checks and secure coding practices to the earliest stages of the SDLC. This bakes security into development instead of relying on patches during and after production. Add security checklists to stories, wire scanners, and policy gates into CI, and fix issues while the context is fresh.
Uphold the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
PoLP means granting only the necessary privileges to do the job. Give people and services exactly what they need with short-lived tokens and least-privilege scopes—and nothing more. Review permissions on a regular schedule and revoke anything stale, require multi-factor authentication (MFA), and log high-risk actions.
Secure Your Code With Legit
It’s never too late to implement better secure coding practices into the existing developer workflow. Legit Security runs checks where developers work: pull requests, CI/CD, and the integrated development environment (IDE), so risky changes surface immediately. Legit detects vulnerable code and exposed secrets, maps issues to owners, and prioritizes what to tackle first by severity, exploitability, and total exposure.
Legit Security also consolidates your security findings from various scanning tools to cut through alert fatigue (making better sense of the results) and fix the most important risks first. Legit deduplicates and ranks, then routes them to the right teams. Legit's advanced code change management and protection deepens AppSec visibility and remediation across code changes.
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