Cyber Defense
Source code security review services earn their cost in one specific way: a penetration test finds the injection on the search page, and a code review finds the twelve other places the same helper is called. One is an instance. The other is the class of bug, and only the code shows it.
We combine tuned static analysis with manual review by people who read the code. Automated tools give breadth and catch known-bad patterns; they also generate the false positives that make developers stop reading. Everything we report has been traced from the entry point to the sink by hand, with file and line, so the fix is obvious and the argument is over.
Review works best against the design questions tools cannot ask: is authorisation enforced centrally or re-implemented per handler, is the cryptography correct as well as strong, does untrusted data ever reach a template unescaped. Pair it with web application penetration testing: code review says what is wrong, the test says what is reachable.
Why you need it
01 / 06A test reaches the code paths it can reach. A review sees the handler behind the feature flag, the admin endpoint that is not linked, and the second call site of the unsafe function that nobody remembered.
A design flaw found in review is a refactor. The same flaw found after launch is an incident, a patch, a customer notification and a re-test. Reviewing at merge or before a major release is where the economics sit.
A hard-coded key, a weak random source used to generate tokens, a cryptographic mode without integrity, an authorisation check that runs after the side effect. None of these look wrong from outside until the day they do.
Secure development lifecycle expectations under ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2, and most enterprise security questionnaires, ask whether code is reviewed for security. A dated review with findings and closure answers it directly.
Instrument
02 / 06The same codebase seen twice: automated output, then the findings that survive a human following the data from input to sink.
What we deliver
03 / 06Semgrep with rules written for your stack and your frameworks, CodeQL where the language is supported, and language-specific analysers, run against the whole repository to establish breadth, then triaged so that what reaches you is signal.
Authentication, session handling, authorisation checks, password and token storage, cryptographic use, file handling and upload, deserialisation, and every place user-controlled data crosses a trust boundary. This is the part that finds design flaws.
Following untrusted input from each entry point (request parameters, headers, message queues, uploaded files, third-party callbacks) to every sink that executes, queries, renders or writes it, and reporting where sanitisation is missing rather than where a pattern matched.
Credentials, API keys and private keys in code, configuration and version-control history; debug settings enabled in production paths; and the difference between what the deployment configuration claims and what the code reads.
Third-party libraries with known vulnerabilities, filtered to those that are actually reachable from your code, plus licence and provenance issues, unpinned versions, and build scripts that fetch from places nobody has audited.
A working session on the findings with the team that owns the code, and a short set of patterns to standardise: the central authorisation helper, the parameterised query wrapper, the one place output encoding happens.
How we run it
04 / 06The architecture, the languages and frameworks, what the application protects, and where the team already has doubts. Reviews are far more valuable when the engineers say where the bodies are buried.
Week 0Repositories, branches and commit hash under review, the modules that matter most, and what is explicitly excluded: generated code, vendored dependencies, legacy services being retired. Access is read-only and time-bound.
Week 0Static analysis across the codebase, dependency and secret scanning, and a first pass at complexity and hot-spot identification to direct the manual effort at the code that matters.
Days 1-2Security-critical paths read line by line, tool output triaged and either traced to a real finding or discarded with a reason, and data flow followed from entry point to sink.
Days 3-8Findings with file, line, the vulnerable snippet, the traced path and a concrete fix: a patch or pull request where the change is small enough to write. Ranked by exploitability and by how many call sites share the root cause.
Days 9-10The corrected commits are re-read, including a check that the fix was applied at every call site rather than at the one we named, and a closure note is issued for your audit file.
After your fixesKey benefits
05 / 06Findings are grouped by the pattern that produced them, so one change to a shared helper closes eleven issues instead of eleven separate patches.
The walkthrough and the rule set stay with the team. Custom static-analysis rules from the engagement can run in your pipeline afterwards and stop the same bug being written again.
A dated review against a named commit, with findings and verified closure, is exactly what an ISO 27001:2022 or SOC 2 assessor means by secure development lifecycle evidence.
Tools we use
06 / 06No “latest tech tools”. These are the ones your report will cite, alongside the manual work that a tool cannot do for you.
Static analysis
Dependencies and supply chain
Secrets
Verification
Methodology
Why Aphelion
SharedDarshap Nayak, formerly of KPMG, holds a master’s degree in cybersecurity and more than seven years in security operations. Jaimin Somani brings fifteen-plus years of academic and hands-on VAPT. Hemang Desai is an ICT network specialist from Australia. You will meet them, not a logo.
Meet the teamEvery finding arrives with the reproduction steps, the affected asset and the fix, ranked by what it actually reaches in your environment, not by a CVSS number copied from a scanner. You get the report and the raw output, not a summary of a summary.
See how we testAhmedabad and Sharjah, working the same methodology on the same tooling. Indian data-residency requirements and UAE delivery are both ordinary here, and the AphelioNYX AD Pen-Test module runs entirely inside your perimeter when regulation says it must.
The platformInvent a statistic to make a slide land. Publish your name as a client without written permission. Print an award badge nobody awarded. Founded in 2024. We say so, and we attribute experience to the people who have it.
Ask us anythingAcross the globe, and across eight industries. We name a client only with their written permission.
AphelioNYX is SOC 2, ISO and GDPR compliant; attestations are available on request under NDA. We would rather hand you the report than print a badge.
Questions
FAQNext door
RelatedA personalised walkthrough and a free readiness assessment against the frameworks you are actually being asked for. Pick a time that suits you, or write to us. We reply within one business day.