Wakefield vs. SAST
July 2026
Static Application Security Testing analyzes source code for risky patterns and tainted data flows. It is useful early in the development loop, but it reasons about code that might be exploitable — not behavior that is. For access control and business logic, that distinction is everything.
The false-positive tax
SAST flags potential paths. Whether a path is actually reachable, actually exploitable, and actually a violation of intent requires runtime context the analyzer does not have. The result is large backlogs of 'findings' that engineers triage by hand, most of which are not real.
Precision is not a nicety here, it is the whole game. A verifier with even a 1% false-positive rate, run across thousands of candidates against an app with a handful of real bugs, buries the true positives under hundreds of false ones. Wakefield reports only what it exploited: its false-positive rate is near zero because a finding only exists once the system has reproduced the attack against the live application.
| Wakefield | SAST | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Running app (black-box) | Source code (static) |
| Source code required | No | Yes |
| Access control & business logic | Core focus | Largely invisible |
| Runtime / behavioral bugs | Yes | No |
| Verification | Exploit-proven | Potential paths only |
| False positives | Near-zero | Very high |
| Language coverage | Language-agnostic (over HTTP) | Per-language analyzers |
Different layers, different truths
SAST needs your source and understands code structure. Wakefield needs only a reachable URL and understands behavior. It is language-agnostic — it does not matter whether your backend is Go, Python, Rust, or a mesh of microservices, because it tests over HTTP against the deployed system.
- No source code, no build integration, no per-language analyzers.
- Finds authorization and business-logic flaws that never appear as a code pattern.
- Proves exploitability instead of listing potential paths.
Use SAST to catch risky patterns before they ship. Use Wakefield to prove what an attacker can actually do to the running system — and to catch the entire class of logic bugs that source analysis cannot see.