Ops measures Mean Time To Respond.
AppSec endures Mean Time To Regex—the stopwatch that starts when a scanner barks and only stops after someone hand-tunes yet another pattern.
A Tuesday Afternoon in Build-Fail Land
Scene 1: Enter the Phantom SQLi
Nightly SAST screams “SQL injection!”—but the flagged call only builds a log string. The security engineer just wants the build light to flip green, so she writes a quick pattern. The alert vanishes, but, silently, so does detection for real injection payloads. (If accuracy matters, see the 2025 SAST Accuracy Report which shows pattern scanners routinely miss.)
Scene 2: The Regex Cascade
One sprint later a new date-parsing library lands; SAST now flags “Potential Path Traversal.” A second bespoke rule appears.
Scene 3: Time to Release
Unfortunately, the new path traversal rule matches every os.path.join() helper in the repo. Juniors are furious, seniors eye-roll, and the release is frozen. Six Hours, three context-switches, and near-zero risk reduction later, the release ships.
This is your Mean Time to Regex (MTTR). Yes, a horrible rebranding of the real MTTR. But for AppSec, this is life, and the time and caffeine spent on these alerts (six hours and a half-finished latte) is gone. Only at the end of the day, our hero realizes the AI copilot has introduced two new idioms the scanner can’t parse, so maybe a second latte would help.
Your story might look different, but I bet this tale sounds familiar. This has been the approach in the industry for decades.
“Semgrep rule-writing is simple in principle, but it can be easy to make mistakes in practice, especially for new rule writers.” — Brandon Wu, Semgrep
Déjà Vu from the “Known Knowns” Post
In last week’s “Beyond Pattern Matching” piece, we mapped security into Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns. Pattern scanners live comfortably in the first bucket—but real-world code lives mostly everywhere else. MTTR (Regex) is what happens when you force deterministic tooling to patrol a non-deterministic universe created by creative humans (developers) and their coding assistants (AI).
Why “Regex Tax” ≠ Risk Reduction
- Rule Inflation – Every new library spawns a new signature.
- Silent Failures – A brittle pattern quietly stops matching while CI says “green.”
- Human Drag – Skilled engineers burn cycles tending and curating rules instead of building value.
OWASP’s Static Code Analysis guide doesn’t mince words: “A static code analysis tool will often produce false positive results…” Noise isn’t an accident—it’s the out-of-the-box, factory setting for these tools.
As an industry, we task our top security talent with the most mundane job—regex—to police the most creative resource—developers. That’s unsustainable.
Enter MTTC—Mean Time to Context
DryRun Security’s Contextual Security Analysis (CSA) skips the rule mill entirely. It ingests five context vectors—Surface, Language, Intent, Design, Environment (SLIDE)—and returns insights while the pull-request conversation is still fresh. MTTC is measured in seconds, not hours.
Richard Cook’s classic safety principle explains the payoff of context for security: “Catastrophe requires multiple failures—single-point failures are not enough.” While this was written in the realm of safety science, the correlation to security is undeniable. Regex rules and patterns hunt single points of failure, however context reveals the lethal combinations and unexpected failure modes.
SAST vs. Contextual Security Analysis
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Four Simple Moves = Big Impact
Legacy SAST tools lock AppSec teams in a frustrating loop—endlessly crafting fragile regex patterns to silence false positives, all while critical vulnerabilities slip through unnoticed. You don’t have to rely on Regex anymore. You don’t have to find only the known-knowns. Get a better return on your investment in security.
1. Log Your Regex Tax
Think back: two sprints ago. How many real developer hours went into hand-crafting, validating, and debugging static analysis rules? Track it. That’s your regex tax.
2. Run a MTTC Pilot
Take DryRun’s Contextual Security Analysis engine and point it at your noisiest repo (or all of your repos!). See what happens when context replaces brittle patterns: accuracy increases, developers are happier, and there’s no regex needed!
3. Report the Delta
How many developer hours did you get back? Show your team the before and after.
4. Remove Toil from AppSec
Stop pouring time and money into rule writing, tuning, and maintenance. Shift those resources into strategic uses of your team.
That’s it. Context isn’t a luxury—it’s your next productivity unlock.
Trade Up Today
Ready to retire MTTR (Regex) and win back your engineers’ Tuesdays? Download the 2025 SAST Accuracy Report or kick off a free 2-week trial with DryRun Security. MTTC > MTTR.
