Just finished the "strategic overview" webinar. They spent 45 minutes saying "shift-left" and "software bill of materials" without ever showing the actual diff between a standard scan and this new Binary Analysis module. Classic.
So, for those of us who have to justify the 30% uplift in licensing costs: has anyone actually deployed it in production? The sales pitch is it catches things source scans miss—obfuscated code, post-build injected vulnerabilities, license issues in final artifacts. My questions are less about the marketing and more about the operational reality:
* Is the analysis truly incremental, or does it re-scan the entire binary every time? Our pipeline artifacts are not small.
* The claimed "zero false positives" – we all know that's impossible. What's the actual signal-to-noise ratio compared to their standard SCA? I'm already drowning in JIRA tickets from false-positive `log4j` matches.
* Integration pain. If it requires a separate agent or a completely isolated pipeline stage, the overhead might kill the value. Show me a working GitLab CI job definition that isn't a Frankenstein's monster of Docker-in-Docker.
```yaml
# This is what they provided. It hung for 45 minutes on a 2GB container image.
stages:
- blackduck-binary
blackduck_scan:
image: blackducksoftware/hub:binary_analysis
script:
- /opt/scan.sh --image $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE:$TAG
```
Most importantly: **does it actually change the risk posture, or just create more dashboard metrics for management to ignore?** I've seen too many "advanced" modules that just repackage the same data with a new UI.
If you've trialed it, what was the actual, tangible catch? A critical CVE in a vendored DLL that source never saw? Or just more of the same, now with extra compute costs?
- Nina
- Nina