Accelerating Product Security Verification in High-Velocity Software Environments

If you work in application security today, you’re constantly trying to balance two forces that are pulling in opposite directions: shipping software faster and proving that it’s secure.

Release cycles are getting shorter. Architectures are more distributed. Business logic is more complex than it’s ever been. AI code generators and vibe coding are creating more apps than ever. But most application security testing approaches were designed for a world in which deep testing could take weeks.

What we see in practice is that many AppSec programs are doing the best they can with tools and processes that simply don’t scale to modern development velocity. The result is long testing cycles, growing backlogs, and too many gaps in coverage, especially for complex logic flaws.

This post looks at why traditional application security testing struggles at scale, and how a different approach we call Total Context Security can help teams verify security faster without giving up depth or confidence.

Why Traditional Application Security Testing Falls Short

Most security leaders already know these problems, because they live with them every day.

Manual testing doesn’t scale

Even with automation, meaningful application security testing still depends heavily on human effort. That means testing cycles measured in weeks instead of days, and constant pressure to cut scope or delay releases.

Security teams can’t keep up with engineering velocity

It’s common to see hundreds or even thousands of developers supported by a relatively small security team. As release frequency increases, maintaining consistent, deep testing across all applications becomes extremely difficult.

Logic vulnerabilities are routinely missed

Automated tools are very good at finding known patterns. They are much less effective at identifying complex, context-dependent logic flaws — the kinds of vulnerabilities that often lead to serious security incidents or outages.

False positives consume too much time

High false positive rates force security teams to spend large amounts of time on triage, exception handling, and retesting instead of actually reducing risk.

As applications become more distributed and business logic becomes more central to how systems work, the most serious failures we see are increasingly caused by logic and enforcement errors, not simple coding mistakes.

The Total Context Security Way to Approach Application Security

We think part of the problem is that most tools focus on generating findings, not on verifying security in the context of your business and threat landscape.

Total Context Security is an approach to application security testing that emphasizes three things:

• Understanding how the application is supposed to work within your policy framework
• Proving that vulnerability findings are real and reproducible
• Doing both fast enough to keep up with modern development
• Recommending remediations that make sense for your organization
  
  

At Staris, we implement this process using automated white-box analysis that mirrors how experienced Application Security Engineers actually work:

Understand the business context

We start by looking at what the application is meant to do, why it exists, and the policy environment in which it is running.

Extract architecture and plan testing

We analyze code, frameworks, libraries, and workflows to build a realistic attack plan, similar to how a senior AppSec engineer would approach a manual review.

Execute and prove findings

We use AI-driven analysis, code generation, and tooling to validate issues through deterministic exploitation or equivalent proof.

Deliver verified results

The output focuses on confirmed true positives and context-aware remediation guidance, not long lists of speculative alerts.

The goal is not to produce more findings. It’s to produce results that security and engineering teams can trust and immediately take action upon.

What Teams See in Practice

Staris works with the world’s largest and most demanding organizations, as well as independent software vendors to accelerate their application development and security testing cycles. Through structured testing cycles, we’ve been able to measure the effectiveness of the Total Context Security process.

Global Infrastructure & Software Company

A large global software provider evaluated Staris alongside its internal application security team across ten internal applications.

What they saw:

• Testing cycles dropped from an average of 130+ hours to about 24 hours
• 28 total proven vulnerabilities were identified, including seven complex logic flaws
• Three novel vulnerabilities were discovered that were previously unknown
  
• No false positives, matching internal team quality
  
  

They were able to get results comparable to expert human testing, but in a fraction of the time.

Global Professional Services & Software Organization

Another organization used Staris to accelerate security verification for a proprietary application platform with more than 660,000 lines of code across multiple languages.

Their results:

• Testing time dropped from 55+ hours to about 8 hours
• Six proven novel vulnerabilities were identified
  
• Zero false positives

Many of the issues required reasoning across instrumentation, execution flow, and business logic, which are very difficult to scale through manual review alone.

Where Application Security Is Headed

Application security is moving away from simply detecting potential issues and toward verifying that systems are actually secure.

In high-velocity environments, the approaches that work will be the ones that combine:

• Context about the application and the business environment
• Proof that the findings are real and reproducible
• Speed to produce results
• Remediation that understands the context of the application and the business environment

Total Context Security is designed to help organizations move faster while increasing confidence in their security posture.

About Staris

Staris AI provides the Total Context Security platform for application security verification. We help high-velocity software organizations validate security faster without compromising depth or accuracy. Staris was founded by experienced cybersecurity and software leaders from Amazon, Accenture, and Palo Alto Networks, and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.

If this resonates and you want to see how Total Context Security works in practice, you can reach us at sales@staris.tech.