Methods
What a tool can do, and what needs a human
Tools find a lot, fast. But “may this user see this record?” cannot be judged without knowing the business rules. An audit uses both, for different jobs.
- Architecture review
- What can be automated: Help inventorying the components, no more
- What needs human judgment: Whether trust boundaries, the authorization model and tenant boundaries match the business rules
- Source code review
- What can be automated: Pattern detection: dangerous APIs, hard-coded secrets
- What needs human judgment: Whether every path has an ownership check, and which ones do not
- SAST (static analysis)
- What can be automated: Data-flow analysis lists injection candidates
- What needs human judgment: Removing false positives and confirming reachability
- DAST (dynamic testing)
- What can be automated: Scanning the running app for known patterns
- What needs human judgment: Deciding how far it is safe to go, and checking screens behind login
- Configuration review
- What can be automated: Extracting settings and comparing them with known baselines
- What needs human judgment: Whether each exception is justified, and how far permissions can be reduced
- Manual testing
- What can be automated: Barely
- What needs human judgment: Crossing users and tenants, abusing business logic
- Retest
- What can be automated: Regression tests and CI gates lock the fix in
- What needs human judgment: Confirming the fix closed the root cause