Software supply chain attacks have increased by 742% in the past three years. Here’s how software composition analysis (SCA) can play a critical role in mitigating the risks of compromise.
Today’s applications are complex pieces of software, involving multiple components, third-party integrations, and cloud services. Increasingly, they’re also assembled from multiple, disparate sources: 40-80% of code in new software projects comes from third parties, primarily from open-source components. In today’s accelerated software development lifecycles (SDLCs), that’s great for speed and efficiency, but it comes with a price tag: an expanding attack surface with software vulnerabilities at the core.
The interconnections between these components create a complex supply chain in which a single vulnerability can be exploited, triggering compromises that spread far and wide. From a cyber attacker’s perspective, the software supply chain represents an expanded attack surface with access to high-value data and systems.
As the re-use of code, libraries, and other components becomes a fact of life in software development, attackers are constantly probing, looking for weaknesses — old and new — and the software supply chain offers a rich vein of vulnerability to be exploited.
From a defender’s perspective, managing application and supply chain security in an accelerated development environment is tricky; the likelihood of both known vulnerabilities and new software weaknesses slipping through the cracks is high, and visibility can be a challenge. If your AppSec team is dealing with 100,000+ alerts, triage quickly becomes overwhelming.
What can organizations do to mitigate the security risks caused by vulnerabilities in their software applications? And how can they ensure that new ones aren’t introduced during the development process? That’s where software composition analysis (SCA) comes in.
Software composition analysis in security
Software composition analysis is a vital tool for detecting and managing vulnerabilities and licensing issues across the open-source and third-party libraries chain. SCA code scanning analyzes the components that make up an application, helping AppSec and DevOps teams identify and manage vulnerabilities detected:
- Static SCA uses build manifest files to analyze components in source code.
- Dynamic SCA scans binary code, which can be accessed in testing or production, meaning components can be checked in real time.
This information is used to create a software bill of materials (SBOM)— a detailed inventory of an application’s contents and dependencies. The SBOM is compared against known common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs, including those on the National Vulnerability Database) as well as other vulnerability and known exploit trackers, after which present vulnerabilities can be scored and prioritized based on the organization’s needs.
Understanding the nature of weaknesses and security vulnerabilities in code is crucial for AppSec teams looking to develop a proactive security approach. For this reason, SCA is often integrated into continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, enabling secure code across the SDLC. SCA’s capacity to identify vulnerabilities across the open-source and third-party libraries chain makes it a critical component of ASPM.
The key benefits of SCA security tools
For security teams and software development teams working in fast-paced, often complex environments, the benefits of software composition analysis include: SCA tools bring significant advantages:
- Early vulnerability identification: When SCA is integrated for automated scanning and analysis, it can detect security risks before software is deployed, allowing for resolution before going live. This makes it a core enabler of the “shift left” strategy, in which early and continuous monitoring promote more secure software development.
- Generate a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM): SCA tools inspect everything from package managers to source code and container images. That data becomes an “ingredients list”— an inventory of the details and relationships that make up any application, including dependencies between components, patches applied, and known vulnerabilities. This bill of materials gives a transparent insight into applications, enabling developers and security teams to adopt a proactive approach to risk assessment and vulnerability management.
- Reduce manual processes: SCA tools help teams track, assess, and manage analyses of complex applications without the need for manual intervention. This frees up time to focus on more complex threats or issues.
- Manage license compliance: The detailed list of components compiled for SBOMs helps compliance teams identify and manage the security and compliance of licenses associated with software components.
- Improve software integrity and reliability: Finding and fixing issues earlier in the SDLC contributes to overall quality and reliability of software.
- Enable proactive security: Advanced SCA tools enable continuous monitoring and real-time insights, helping uncover new or previously unknown vulnerabilities as well as changes in existing ones.
Sounds good. But how do you ensure you get the best out of your SCA tools?
Best practices for SCA
As with most tools, to truly optimize them, there are strategies teams can adopt to ensure maximum effectiveness. Some best practices for SCA include:
- Integrate as early in the SDLC as possible: Addressing vulnerabilities in the early stages is usually less complex (and costly) than later in the workflow.
- Create accurate SBOMs: SBOMs are the foundation of an effective SCA process, but some complex applications obscure vulnerabilities, making them hard to detect. Collaboration between developer and security teams is vital.
- Continuously monitor for vulnerabilities: Whether it’s proprietary or third-party code that makes up an application, software is updated all the time. Automated SCA tools can alert teams to new or changed components and related vulnerabilities.
- Prioritize based on risk: When everything’s an emergency, nothing is. Not all vulnerabilities have the potential to have a significant impact on the organization. Teams must have the ability to prioritize and resolve the highest-impact vulnerabilities first.
- Go easy on developers: An SCA tool should seamlessly embed into CI/CD pipelines, making it easier to work with existing workflows, and helping software developers prioritize security.
Essential SCA tool features
Selecting the right SCA tool is a strategic decision that affects the security and efficiency of your software development lifecycle. With that in mind, what should you look for in a SCA security tool?
More signal, less noise:
Many traditional SCA tools generate high numbers of false positives/negatives and non-actionable alerts, which erodes developer trust. The most advanced software composition analysis security tools SCA tools reduce noise and facilitate remediation through consolidated issue analysis, vulnerability aggregation, and root cause analysis to transform multiple vulnerabilities into a single, actionable issue.
Clarity, not confusion:
Navigating complex dependencies, and distinguishing between direct and indirect package dependencies is tricky. Incorporating SCA tools that provide advanced assessment and dynamic visualizations that can help clarify the full scope of project dependencies will go a long way toward solving this challenge. SCA tools can integrate with version control systems such as Git for analysis of code at different stages of development, tracking changes over time.
Context, for risk-based prioritization:
Context-sensitive prioritization ensures that security teams stay focused on the most critical risks. Advanced SCA tools help analyze issues based on reachability, exploitability, and potential damage.
Join the dots:
Some SCA solutions can link issues to SBOM, making it easier for teams to keep pace with compliance requirements, standards, package maintenance, and actual code usage.
The more AppSec and security teams can do to reduce noise, prioritize risks, and remediate issues, the more streamlined the software development lifecycle becomes. SCA does a great job of analyzing open-source and third-party code, but what about proprietary source code? There’s a tool for that, too.
SCA and SAST
While SCA focuses primarily on open-source components and third-party libraries, how can defenders understand security vulnerabilities in proprietary and custom code? Static Application Security Testing (SAST) has it covered.
As the first letter in the name suggests, SAST looks for vulnerabilities in code in its static state (SCA can analyze in-production). Used in the earliest stages of development, a SAST tool analyzes code before the application is built, looking for weaknesses such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, or security configuration errors.
One of the key benefits of SAST is that it can analyze every single line of code in an application, making it truly comprehensive. On the downside, because it can truly deep dive into code, SAST can yield false positives and require human expertise to maximize the insights.
Like SCA, SAST can help detect issues early in the development cycle, saving time and effort. It can also integrate into the SDLC, providing analysis from day one to project completion. Each tool has a different scope, meaning they can complement each other as part of a more comprehensive application security approach.
Better together? SCA and SAST
As we mentioned above, SCA and SAST between them give AppSec and developer teams coverage across the entire software stack – open source to proprietary – and throughout each stage of the SDLC. Between them, they can detect the security errors that creep into code in today’s accelerated SDLCs. The more complex the project, the more dependencies, the harder it can be for AppSec and developer teams to balance the need for speed against an ever-growing list of software vulnerabilities. By combining both approaches, organizations get a more comprehensive application security strategy.
OX’s software composition analysis (SCA)
OX’s SCA is a comprehensive, efficient solution to the security and compliance challenges posed by open-source libraries and third-party dependencies in codebases.
Traditional software composition analysis tools generate numerous, non-actionable alerts and false positives, eroding developer trust and creating bottlenecks. OX addresses this by streamlining the vulnerability management process in key ways, including: consolidated issue analysis, advanced dependency assessment, context-sensitive prioritization, and comprehensive issue management.
Find out how you can pinpoint vulnerabilities in minutes with OX’s built-in SCA solution, start for free now.
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