SECURE CODE REVIEW

A black-box penetration test can only see what the running application exposes. The tester sends requests, observes responses, and infers what must be happening inside, but some weaknesses never surface at the boundary. A secure code review reads the source code itself instead of probing the application from outside. It is white-box by definition. Every branch, every dependency, every trust decision your developers made is on the table, whether or not an attacker could easily trigger it from the outside today.

What a review can see that a black-box test cannot

Each of these can sit invisible behind a perfectly ordinary-looking HTTP interface:

The two approaches answer different questions, and they are strongest together: a code review works inside-out, and a penetration test works outside-in.

How we work

Every review runs through the same four steps.

1. 1

   Application profiling

   We set up with your team and learn how the application actually works: the architecture, the frameworks and languages in use, where input enters the system, where the trust boundaries sit, and which components matter most to the business. This step decides where review effort concentrates. A payment module and a marketing banner do not deserve equal attention.

   The scope, the languages and frameworks covered, and the depth of review are all agreed with you here; the toolchain adapts to your stack.

2. 2

   Static analysis

   We run static analysis (SAST) tools appropriate to each programming language in the codebase. Static analysis is what makes whole-codebase coverage possible: it traces data flow from untrusted sources toward dangerous sinks, flags tainted input reaching a query or a command, and surfaces candidate issues in files no human would think to open.

   The output of this step is a candidate list, deliberately broad, and not yet a set of findings.

3. 3

   Manual analysis

   An analyst reviews the candidates by hand. Every flagged issue is traced through the actual code path to determine whether it is exploitable in context or a false positive (a pattern that looks dangerous but is neutralised by validation the tool could not follow). The analyst reads for what the tools miss: false negatives, and above all logic flaws (a missing authorisation check, a crypto decision that is syntactically fine and cryptographically wrong) because no pattern matcher understands what your application is supposed to allow.

4. 4

   Recommendation

   For every confirmed vulnerability, we show exactly where it lives in the code (file, function, line) and how to fix it.

   Written for the language and framework you are actually using.

Why manual analysis matters

Left unreviewed, a SAST scan produces two failure modes at once. The first is false positives: the tool flags a data flow as tainted because it cannot see the validation layer, the framework's built-in encoding, or the business rule that makes the path unreachable, and a report full of these trains your developers to ignore it. The second is quieter and worse: false negatives. A tool matches patterns; it does not understand intent. It will not notice that an endpoint checks whether a user is logged in but never which user owns the record, or that a signing function uses a key derived from a predictable value, because nothing in those lines matches a known-bad signature. The manual analysis step exists to correct both errors, cutting the noise down to confirmed, exploitable issues, and adding back the logic-level findings automation structurally cannot produce.

What you get

Every report contains, at minimum:

Team credentials

Related services

Pairing this review with a web application or mobile application penetration test covers both directions, inside-out and outside-in, and findings from each side sharpen the other.