In the world of software development, the only truly scalable solution for maintaining secure code is to have a security expert on every development team. These experts can harden code and fix vulnerabilities as quickly as developers produce it. However, the reality is that there simply aren’t enough individuals with a deep understanding of security risks and coding practices required to fill these roles. At Rapid Labs, we faced this challenge head-on. Confronted with a critical security breach that could have compromised our application, we turned to Pixee.ai. With our commitment to delivering robust and secure solutions, we found Pixeebot a reliable and efficient code security tool that steps in as our virtual product security engineer, always present and proactively hardening our code. It advises on pull requests and responds to scans that detect vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional tools that generate extensive reports, Pixeebot communicates directly in code and provides actionable insights and solutions.
The Power of Pixeebot: Your Virtual Security Engineer
Built as a GitHub App, Pixeebot is designed to boost developer productivity and eliminate backlog items by doing more than just identifying flaws. It acts like a coding partner that allows developers to focus solely on coding while Pixeebot takes care of security concerns. Powered by the open-source Codemodder framework, Pixeebot automates code changes and makes advanced security engineering accessible to teams of all sizes.
Real-World Applications at Rapid Labs
We have integrated Pixee into our Rapid Labs GitHub and applied it to our two active Python projects: Cardio-Chatbot and CRM. The CRM project focuses on developing a comprehensive customer relationship management system to meet our specific business needs. Conversely, the Cardio Chatbot project aims to create an AI-driven chatbot to assist patients in monitoring cardiovascular health, providing personalized advice, and facilitating appointment scheduling. Both projects are currently in active development on GitHub.
Initial Application Security Efforts and the Need for Evolution
At Rapid Labs, our initial application security efforts were limited. Before integrating Pixee.ai, we relied heavily on manual code reviews, and basic static analysis tools to identify and address security issues. While these methods provided a baseline level of security, they were time-consuming, prone to human error, and often missed some vulnerabilities.
To automate our manual efforts, we used the SonarCloud for static code analysis. SonarCloud helped us identify some code smells, bugs, and vulnerabilities, but it had its limitations. One major drawback was that SonarCloud did not automatically generate pull requests and fix issues when it found vulnerabilities. Instead, our developers had to sift through extensive reports to pinpoint actionable insights and manually create pull requests to address the issues, which added to their workload and slowed down the development process.
Despite these efforts, we recognized that our approach was not scalable and left room for significant improvement. We needed a more automated and efficient solution to ensure our code remained secure and high-quality without overburdening our development team.
Transformative Change with Pixeebot Integration
With the integration of Pixeebot in our GitHub repositories, our application security practices took a transformative change. This feature streamlined our workflow by eliminating the need for manual intervention in many cases. Instead of developers spending valuable time going through extensive reports and manually fixing issues, Pixeebot provided real-time, actionable insights directly within our codebase, such as identifying security vulnerabilities, suggesting code optimizations, and highlighting potential bugs for immediate resolution.
Installation and setup of Pixee.ai
The installation of Pixee.ai in our GitHub repository was straightforward. Here are the steps we followed:
2. We connected our CRM and Cardio-Chatbot repositories into pixee.ai and granted necessary permissions.
1. We registered for an account on Pixee.ai and installed it on our GitHub profile.
