Ninety-one percent of organizations experienced at least one software supply chain security incident in 2023. Here’s what you need to know about software supply chain security.
Research shows that 95% of organizations have at least one high, critical, or apocalyptic risk within their software supply chain, with the average organization having nine. Small wonder, then, that costs arising from software supply chain attacks will hit an estimated $138 billion by 2031 – up from $46 billion in 2023.
In the wake of multiple, high-profile breaches, securing the software supply chain has become a critical priority for many organizations: an estimated 80% will have adopted specialized processes and tools across the enterprise by 2027.
How did software supply chains become so vulnerable?
Software supply chain security risks have their roots in overlapping challenges:
- Companies not rooted in software development are increasingly building, developing, shipping, and integrating software into their network environments, often without the tooling and CI/CD integration needed to affect remediation and improve cybersecurity posture.
- Accelerated software development lifecycles (SDLCs) mean that the reuse of code, libraries, and other software components are facts of life. This speeds up the software development process, but can also introduce security vulnerabilities and weaken your security posture. Short release cycles and frequent changes make the introduction of potential vulnerabilities more likely and make it very difficult for AppSec and DevOps teams to address the most critical issues while maintaining pace.
What can organizations do to mitigate the supply chain security risks caused by vulnerabilities in their software applications? And how can application security teams ensure that new ones aren’t introduced during the development process?
Software supply chain security has the answers to a lot of those questions.
Software supply chain security: what it is; why you need more rigorous security testing.
Software supply chain security (SSCS) allows security teams to identify, analyze, and mitigate the risks associated with vulnerabilities in software code throughout the software development lifecycle, from design to deployment.
Many of today’s business applications — whether they come from third-party vendors or are developed in-house — include both proprietary and open-source components, tools and processes, including:
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.
For threat actors, the software supply chain offers an expanded attack surface with access to high-value sensitive data and systems. When so many breaches originate with vulnerabilities in third-party components, organizations need to understand the interconnections, relationships between, and dependencies of software, systems, and data. When thinking about holistic cybersecurity, it’s that shift of focus from a single application or piece of software to the entire software supply chain (including development processes and tools) that must occur.
If that sounds like a big job, it is. Fortunately, there are tools to help.
Strengthen your software supply chain
Software supply chain security (SSCS) tools secure all of the elements used to build and publish applications. Beginning with the design phase, SSCS uses automated processes to identify, analyze, and monitor software, along with any related vulnerabilities. Some of the key benefits of supply chain security software include:
Vulnerability detection and management:
SSCS continuously scans code, dependencies, and containers for known vulnerabilities. It then ranks vulnerabilities based on relevance, criticality, and exploitability so that security teams can apply workflows, remediate vulnerabilities, and improve software security posture.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA):
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. This information is used to create a software bill of materials and inform teams’ workflows and security policies.
Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation:
SBOMs are detailed inventories of an application’s contents and dependencies. The data compiled is compared against data from sources such as the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), along with other vulnerability and known exploit trackers to help score and prioritize according to the organization’s IT environment.
Software integrity:
Code signing and logging provide tamper-proof records of changes throughout the development pipeline, helping to ensure the integrity and authenticity of code. Along with SCA and SBOM, this mitigates the risks associated with malicious packages or malicious code that can be introduced during the development process.
Continuous monitoring:
SCSS provides real-time alerts in response to suspicious activity or detection of new vulnerabilities. Machine learning helps establish baseline, known good behaviors, enabling anomaly detection that could indicate a breach.
Bottom line: Software supply chain security platforms are a good fit for organizations that have complex supply chains comprising multiple vendors, open-source libraries, and external dependencies. In sectors where supply chain vulnerabilities have the capacity to cause significant, serious impact – critical infrastructure, healthcare, etc. – the ability to identify and mitigate compromised components in vendor software is crucial.
With so much at stake, there are best practices, regulations, and frameworks to guide organizations seeking to maximize the benefits of their supply chain security strategy. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Secure development practices and supply chain security guidance
We’ve already seen how short release cycles, rapid iteration, and code reuse contribute to insecure software development. It’s an unfortunate reality that, despite advances in tools and information, some of the most prevalent software supply chain vulnerabilities have been around for years, including command injection, sensitive data in log files, and cross-site scripting (XSS).
In fact, research shows that six of the top 10 most commonly observed vulnerabilities are tied to poor implementation of fundamental security practices such as:
- Authentication
- Encryption
- Exploitable information in logs
- The principle of least privilege
Source: OSC&R in the Wild
What can organizations do to ensure more secure software application development practices?
The critical importance of software supply chain security is underlined by a growth in security practices, guidelines, and frameworks to help organizations adopt a best-practice approach. For example, Gartner’s top practices to mitigate supply chain security risks in software development and delivery include:
Internal and external code:
Including strong version control policies, trusted component registries, and third-party risk management.
Delivery pipeline:
Including secrets scanning and management, signing and hashing for provenance, and hardening the security of the CI/CD pipeline. Operating environment: Including least privilege access controls, machine identity management, and anomaly detection and response.
At the wider industry, community, and regulatory levels, proposals for developing a software supply chain security framework include:
- Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) framework, developed by the open-source community, in conjunction with industry participants. This proposes multiple “tracks” composed of different assurance levels.
- In the United States, NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework provides guidelines built around established secure software development practices.
- Globally, guidance or regulations around enhancing software supply chain security include: the Australian Signals Directorate’s Guidelines for Software Development, the Canadian Center for Cyber Security Supply Chain Recommendations, and the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act.
From a regulatory compliance perspective, it’s important to note the crucial role played by SBOMs in managing supply chain risk and bringing visibility into the software supply chain. Secure software development practices and security testing can go a long way to ensuring that vulnerabilities aren’t introduced in the first place.
But what happens further along the development chain? When an application is deployed, how do you maintain security?
Macro to micro: the difference between supply chain security and AppSec
As we’ve seen, software supply chain security encompasses the entire software development lifecycle and processes. It covers everything from third-party components and source code to open-source repositories, securing the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Application security hones in and has a more focused scope: The security of a specific application, to ensure that the deployed end product will be secure. Think: Vulnerabilities in the application’s codebase or its runtime environment. Traditional application security testing tools, such as standalone static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and software composition analysis (SCA tools), are no longer enough on their own to secure the software supply chain; complex development environments and IT ecosystems present a rapidly expanding attack surface and require a more comprehensive approach.
Ultimately, SCSS and AppSec complement each other well: where supply chain security has a more proactive, comprehensive approach, AppSec teams are often focused on the detection and remediation of known vulnerabilities and patterns. Between them, they address software security issues from design and build through runtime.
Securing the software supply chain with OX
Software supply chains are under attack. Unfortunately, few organizations have the mature software supply chain security programs they need to keep pace with the attackers. Many have deployed disparate AppSec tools and integrated them with CI/CD pipelines. However, few of these can:
- Triage the signal-to-noise ratio by prioritizing the thousands of risks that arise during the SDLC.
- Secure shadow development and pipelines.
- Handle constantly emerging attack vectors.
- Manage container security.
OX’s Active ASPM platform helps AppSec and software development teams to understand everything in their CI/CD pipelines – from the entirety of the codebase to relationship and dependency mapping for third-party applications and infrastructure, through material code changes that happen throughout the application’s lifecycle.
Learn more about how the OX Active ASPM platform protects the entire software development lifecycle by identifying and addressing hidden risks across every layer, in one platform. Start free today!
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