What Is Application Detection and Response (ADR)?

Application detection and response (ADR) is an emerging cybersecurity category that focuses on application visibility, protection, and remediation. ADR is a comprehensive and proactive approach to application security that incorporates automation, prioritization, contextual analysis, and allows security and development teams to facilitate enhanced threat detection and incident response.

The cybersecurity lingo landscape is filled with similar-sounding terms and their accompanying acronyms. These categories are created — mostly by analyst groups and vendors — as capabilities are needed and developed. Sometimes a category evolves out of an existing term as an extension or “sidecar.” For instance, endpoint detection and response (EDR) was the first “detection and response” category to be coined. Predated by antivirus software (AV), intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and even endpoint protection platforms (EPPs), EDR grew out of the need to take “entry point” security beyond mere identification and into the realm of proactive security, complete with advanced features and functionality.

Following closely on EDR’s heels was network detection and response (NDR), which formed from earlier categories like network traffic analysis (NTA) and network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). Like EDR before it, NDR represented a growing need for advanced analytics and response capabilities, only at the network level rather than on the endpoint. 

From there, the chips started to fall: XDR, MDR, DDR, ITDR, and the one we’re going to focus on today, application detection and response (ADR)

But what is ADR, specifically? Is it a one-to-one match with EDR and NDR, only centered on applications or the application layer in the OSI stack? To some degree, yes, but each category carries its idiosyncrasies and requirements. Why? because how on-prem networks operate isn’t the same as how cloud networks operate. How data functions isn’t the same as how identities or applications function. We thus enter into a confusing nomenclature conundrum that is often complicated by how different entities classify the characteristics of a category. Especially when the category is nascent.

Application detection and response (ADR) is one of the newer “DR” cybersecurity terminologies. Given applications’ meteoric growth over the last decade, and the ubiquity of businesses building their own apps, the industry needed a capability focused on protecting applications from threats. Of course many AppSec tools and methods already existed prior to the anointing of ADR as a term, but ADR, like EDR, NDR, etc. ahead of it, evolves both the definition and the requirements for securing apps at the app layer rather than just around it.

What challenges does application detection and response solve?

The detection phase

ADR specifically helps organizations identify, prioritize, monitor, and mitigate application-based threats and vulnerabilities throughout their entire lifecycle. To truly be an ADR solution, a technology in this category must take into account all the elements that are part and parcel of applications, from commit through run time. This means starting with the codebase (source code, libraries, files, configurations, scripts, etc.) and extending to repositories, network environments (container, cloud), development environments, APIs, and more.

This host of requirements is accomplished through various categories that fall under the umbrella of ADR. As stated above, ADR is part of the AppSec evolution; it therefore encompasses much of the tried-and-true technology and processes that came before it, including various vulnerability assessment tools such as SAST, DAST, code scanning, secrets scanning, artifact integrity scanning, and SBOM. It’s the unification/incorporation/inclusion of multiple analyses, enriched by threat intelligence and business context for applications, that turns individual AppSec tools into an ADR program or process.

Beyond identifying the what — that is, what comprises code — ADR incorporates the how — how the code is used throughout its lifecycle. This includes things like tracking user interactions, system interactions, data flows, baseline behaviors, and API calls, all of which help AppSec teams identify suspicious activities that could indicate a design flaw, a vulnerability, or even an active compromise.

To achieve all this, ADR solutions should embrace automation for low-level activities and use machine learning to establish baselines for normal application behavior and flag deviations that could be malicious.

Importantly, ADR can only be effective if all the source data from the disparate tools mentioned above are aggregated, normalized, deduplicated, and correlated. It’s this process that ensures AppSec teams can arrive at a single, consolidated point of view of their applications’ security posture and then effectively manage it. This is where ADR shines, and how it differs from traditional AppSec, where practitioners are left to manually aggregate and correlate data, and then attempt to make sense of it as the DevOps cycle speeds past them.

The response phase

Once all the pertinent data about an application has been collected, detected, and processed, it’s time to move to the “so what,” in other words, “how to make applications work better, with fewer vulnerabilities and risks to the business?”

ADR does not stop at identifying threat exposures; it involves providing the necessary data to remediate exposures, weaknesses, and risks. As such, an ADR tool or platform should include:

• Threat intelligence and data enrichment

  to supply context, applicability, and the likelihood of exploitability  

• Prioritization mechanisms

  to understand what needs to be addressed first, based on criticality to the individual organization (including the organization’s needs, assets, and risk appetite)

• Dependency graphs

  so AppSec and Ops teams can estimate the potential impact of of an application vulnerability or downstream effects of making changes (including patches and updates)

• Detailed recommendations for triage and remediation

  to provide clear direction on steps to take

• Audit logs

  to help with accountability, compliance, and continuous improvement

• Automated workflows

  to help teams move faster with greater accuracy and less room for oversight or error

• Automated actions

  to fix vulnerabilities, contain an attack or minimize damage from a compromise. Examples of automations for remediation might include isolating the compromised application, blocking malicious traffic, or invalidating compromised sessions.

Key benefits of ADR

Like its close cousins, EDR, NDR, XDR, and the like, ADR is focused on finding and fixing security hygiene issues before they become active incidents. However, it also acknowledges that sometimes security incidents happen, and when they do, rapid response is paramount. 

For these reasons, leading ADR solutions and platforms provide consolidation, normalization, and correlation from a diverse set of data sources and native scanning solutions. Contextualization and prioritization of the data is layered on top, thereby ensuring a complete view of the application environment — including security posture and dependency issues. 

We can sum up the top benefits of ADR as:

• Improved application security:

  Focused on the totality of the application lifecycle, ADR allows AppSec teams and developers understand and address issues early in the development process and after an application is deployed. 

• Early threat detection:

  Because ADR consolidates findings from various data sources, ADR allows teams to identify application- and development-focused threats much faster than siloed security tools.

• Eliminates manual AppSec:

  By bringing AppSec under one umbrella, teams no longer have to manually piece together disparate data, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Instead, ADR offers a streamlined and holistic approach.

• Reduced attack surface:

  ADR minimizes organizations’ attack surfaces through proactive security: surfacing issues early in the development stage and tracking them throughout the entire lifecycle. 

• Faster mean time to response:

  Via detailed recommendations and automated response actions, ADR allows security and development teams to quickly identify and fix vulnerabilities before they become incidents, and allows response teams to act quickly if faced with a compromise.

How ADR improves cyber risk

ADR is a powerful solution for organizations that want to strengthen their application security posture. ADR consolidates formerly siloed and complicated processes and incorporates all the necessary pieces to track code to cloud, and cloud to code. ADR doesn’t simply look at the application as a whole, but scrutinizes all elements that go into an application — from its codebase to the network environments in which developers are building applications — so that AppSec teams and developers can understand the smallest vulnerabilities that could result in compromise. Importantly, ADR provides automation, consolidation, and vulnerability prioritization so that teams aren’t continually stressed and stretched with manual processes (that haven’t even worked well in the past), freeing up time to focus on fixing the most pressing issues of the day.

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