bearer VS semgrep

My team and I released Bearer a couple of weeks ago, a newer open and free alternative to Brakeman to check your code for security and privacy risks. In addition to Ruby/Rails, we also cover your JS/TS code, which allows you to use a single solution for your whole Rails application.

Code security scanning tool (SAST) to discover, filter and prioritize security and privacy risks.

Code security scanning tool (SAST) to discover, filter and prioritize security and privacy risks.

Link to the Recipe https://github.com/Bearer/bearer/blob/main/pkg/classificatio...

Hi HN,

I’m Guillaume, the cofounder of Bearer, an Open Source SAST solution.

After launching a few weeks ago here on Hacker News with support for Ruby and JavaScript stacks, I’m happy to report we’ve just released a new version (v1.2) with TypeScript support!

In terms of code coverage, we use the same rules already implemented for vanilla JavaScript, but as usual, you can build your own.

The rules list is here: https://docs.bearer.com/reference/rules/

It’s a first version for TS, but we believe that thanks to the pre-existing JavaScript support it should already provide good insights.

If you have some TypeScript code, we would love for you to try it out and let us know in the comment below or on our Discord your experience and how we can improve the findings.

You can access the repo here: https://github.com/Bearer/bearer

Thank you again!

It can be challenging to keep up with security best practices. In addition to watching for vulnerability reports, you can also run regular scans on your codebase with a SAST tool like Bearer CLI. It's a free and secure way to get practical security feedback on your ruby code. Check it out on GitHub at bearer/bearer.

Using open-source tools to test open-source projects feels like a great match. It wasn't until the other day that I remembered that the team behind DEV had open-sourced the bones of the site as Forem. To make it an even better match, the stack matches up nicely with the currently supported languages included in Bearer's new free and open-source security application security testing (SAST) tool. Unlike many security tools, this one is really focused on helping devs make sense of security concerns in an actionable way.

Good news! There’s a free open-source tool that can scan your code, check for known risks, and give you a list of things that need fixing. All are sorted by how risky the code is—based on things like how sensitive the data is and how damaging a breach or leak would be. It’s called Bearer.

Semgrep OSS Owner/Maintainer: Semgrep Age: First release on GitHub on February 6th, 2020 License: GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1

Semgrep - https://semgrep.dev

For the SAST stage, I used SonarQube tool. SonarQube is an open-source platform developed by SonarSource for continuous inspection of code quality to perform automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs and code smells on more than 30 programming languages. I preferred SonarQube instead of other SAST tools because it has a detailed documentation and plugins about integration with Jenkins and SonarQube works with Java projects pretty well. Of course you can similar multi-language-supported tools such as Semgrep or language-specific tools such as Bandit.

> Not sure I understand your point.

The problem is using Treesitter (for syntax highlighting and "semantic movements") and an LSP at the same time. So if your language has a LSP, using Treesitter additionally is redundant at best and introduces inconcistency at worst.

I'm not talking about using Treesitter as the parser for the LSP.

> Most popular languages have language-specific tools

I'd say even less popular langauges like Coq^H^H^HRocq, Lean 4, Koka, Idris, Unison, ... have their "own" tools, I do not know of a language that uses a Treesitter parser in its LSP, but I do know about tools like https://semgrep.dev/ (written in OCaml) and Github's code search which use Treesitter.

Well, when I seach for "semgrep", I get a very nice corporate landing page with a "Book Demo" button. Which is a level of hassle that just isn't worth it for smaller teams, because "Book Demo" usually means "We're going to try to do a dance to see how much money we can extract from you." Which smaller teams may only want to do for a handful of key tools.

(4 years ago, I was more willing to put up with enterprise licensing. But in the last two years, I've seen way too many enterprise vendors try to squeeze every penny they can get from existing clients. An enterprise sales process now often means "Expect 30% annual price hikes once you're in too deep to back out.")

There's also an open source "semgrep" project here: https://github.com/semgrep/semgrep. But this seems to be basically a vulernability scanner, going by the README.

Whereas AST-grep seems to focus heavily on things like:

1. One-off searching: "Search my tree for this pattern."

2. Refactoring: "Replace this pattern with this other pattern."

AST-grep also includes a vulnerability scanning mode like semgrep.

It's possible that semgrep also has nice support for (1) and (2), but it isn't clearly visible on their corporate landing page or the first open source README I found.

7. Semgrep