Guide: Secure Code Review

Secure Code Review is a crucial component of security assessment methodologies and plays a valuable role in the identification and mitigation of security vulnerabilities in code.

Why It Is Important:
Secure Code Review is crucial because it is a proactive measure to identify and fix vulnerabilities early in the development process before the application is in production, reducing the risk and cost associated with fixing them at a late stage.

What It Is:
Secure Code Review is the process of auditing the source code of an application to verify that the proper security controls are in place and that the code is free of vulnerabilities. It involves checking the code against a set of guidelines to ensure it meets security standards.

How It Works:
In Secure Code Review, experts manually inspect the source code or use automated tools to find security issues, like buffer overflows, SQL injections, Cross-site scripting (XSS), etc. Once these issues are identified, they are prioritized based on the risk they pose, and remediation steps are provided.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Secure Code Review:
1. Understand the Purpose: Be clear on why Secure Code Review is important. It's mainly to find and fix vulnerabilities early in the process to enhance application security.
2. Know the Process: Understand that Secure Code Review can be performed manually or using automated tools, and it involves going through the code line by line.
3. Recognize Common Vulnerabilities: Be familiar with common coding vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL injections, and buffer overflows.
4. Remediation strategies: Understand the ways in which identified vulnerabilities can be mitigated.
Remember, correct answers not only require knowledge about code review but also the understanding of risk assessment and mitigation.