False Positives in SAST — How I Built Suppression Into My Scanner and Why It Matters

Short summary

False positives in SAST scanners erode trust and attention budget, causing teams to stop triaging findings. The author catalogs three root causes—regex semantic mismatches, framework-hidden safety patterns, and intentional test cases—and proposes a suppression system with documented rationales and JSON-based audit trails.

• •False positives destroy the signal-to-noise ratio and engineer-security team trust, making security programmes invisible
• •Three sources: regex patterns that don't understand semantic context, framework abstractions that make unsafe code safe, and intentional test cases that probe vulnerabilities
• •Suppression design must require documented rationale and expose suppressions in JSON reports for auditability, not hide them

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