sekura

Snyk, Veracode and Sekura: Three Different Jobs

Dependency scanners and SAST tools do detection. Autonomous pentesting does exploitation. These are different jobs. Here is a framework for choosing between Snyk, Veracode and Sekura.

Three tools appear on the same security RFP shortlists. They are solving different problems.

Snyk: Dependency Coverage at Scale

Snyk is a software composition analysis (SCA) tool. It reads your package.json, requirements.txt, pom.xml, or go.sum and tells you which third-party packages carry known CVEs.

This is genuinely useful work. Open-source dependencies are a major attack surface. Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) spread through Java applications precisely because teams did not know which of their services pulled in a vulnerable log4j version. Snyk would have caught that.

The scope of what Snyk answers is specific. It knows about the dependency. It does not know whether the vulnerable function in that dependency is actually called in your code. It does not know whether your network topology exposes the package. It does not run any exploit.

Snyk is the right tool when:

  1. You need a continuous inventory of which packages your applications pull in.
  2. You want automated alerts when a new CVE affects a package you already use.
  3. Your engineering team wants fix suggestions integrated directly into pull requests.

Veracode: SAST for Code Pattern Coverage

Veracode is a static application security testing (SAST) platform. It parses your source code and traces data flows to identify patterns that match known vulnerability classes: SQL injection, cross-site scripting, command injection, and around forty other CWE categories.

The analysis can be thorough. Veracode tracks tainted data across function calls and module boundaries. It supports Java, .NET, Python, JavaScript, Go, and more. Its CWE coverage is broad. It integrates into most CI pipelines.

The limitation is structural. Static analysis reasons about code as text. It does not run your application. It cannot tell you whether the SQL injection it flagged is in a code path that is actually reachable from the internet, or whether your WAF blocks it, or whether the input is sanitized three function calls upstream. False positive rates in enterprise SAST deployments typically run between 40% and 80%. Your team ends up triaging findings rather than fixing them.

Veracode makes sense when:

  1. A compliance framework (SOC 2, FedRAMP, PCI DSS) requires evidence of code-level security review.
  2. You want a systematic catalog of potential vulnerability classes across your entire codebase.
  3. You have dedicated AppSec capacity to manage the triage queue that comes with it.

Sekura: Confirmed Exploitability

Sekura is an autonomous penetration testing platform. We do not scan for patterns. We try to exploit your application.

The pipeline runs seven phases: white-box SAST, recon, dynamic probing, exploit synthesis, exploit-chain analysis, post-quantum cryptography review, and reporting. Every finding in the final report is a confirmed exploit. If Sekura cannot exploit a hypothesis, it does not appear in the report.

This is a strict constraint. You do not get a list of things that might be problems. You get a list of things that are problems.

Here is what a confirmed finding looks like in the output:

Finding:  SQL Injection in /api/orders
Method:   POST /api/orders
Payload:  {"order_id": "1 UNION SELECT * FROM users; --"}
Evidence: HTTP 200, full user table returned (847 rows)
Status:   CONFIRMED EXPLOITABLE
CVSS:     9.1

That is not a guess. That is a working exploit, ready for your remediation team.

How to Choose

These tools are not substitutes. Each answers a different question.

flowchart TD A[Security concern] --> B{What do you need to know?} B --> C[Which dependencies have known CVEs?] B --> D[Does my code match vulnerability patterns?] B --> E[Can an attacker actually compromise my app?] C --> F[Snyk] D --> G[Veracode] E --> H[Sekura]

Here is a practical framework for tooling decisions:

  1. Use Snyk if your primary concern is open-source dependency hygiene and CVE tracking.
  2. Use Veracode if you need compliance evidence from code-level security scanning.
  3. Use Sekura if you want to know what an attacker can actually do to your application today.
  4. Use all three if your risk tolerance justifies it. They stack; they do not conflict.

I think the industry conflates detection with exploitation because detection tools are older, more familiar, and significantly cheaper. But a CVE in a package you depend on does not mean you are exploitable. And a clean SAST report does not mean you are safe. The only way to answer the exploitation question is to try.

Organizations with mature SAST and SCA programs still get breached. The exploited vulnerability is usually absent from any scanner report. It is a logic flaw, a misconfigured access control, or a chain of individually low-severity findings that combine into a critical one. Static analysis cannot see those. Autonomous pentesting can.

The security industry is still calibrating what it means to know you are secure. Running a scan is not the same as running a test.

See what Sekura confirms in your environment at /poc/.