In a software-based world, companies face a challenge: writing good software is difficult. As software becomes more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that it is reliable and secure. There are many ways to make mistakes, whether it`s purchased software, proprietary software, or software provided as a service – and especially open source software. The benefits of open source are clear: faster time to market, better innovation opportunities, lower development costs, and access to a global developer community. However, organizations often overlook the security and risk management challenges associated with using open source. Therefore, SCA tools do not evaluate the security of your application components while they are running. Instead, they analyze your list of dependencies, compare it to their list of known vulnerabilities, and then report that the corresponding dependencies are their results. The result is a software nomenclature (SBOM) that contains basic information about detected open source components, including: Vulnerabilities such as those listed in the OWASP Top 10 and CWE Top 25 2019 are introduced into proprietary code by developers. The most well-known vulnerabilities include SQL injection, incorrect authentication and session management, and cross-site scripting. Static Application Security Testing (SAST) can detect common types of vulnerabilities by examining the code itself while developers write the code and validate, build, and test it. These security tools look for vulnerabilities in the way code is written by your developers. For example, they can identify many of the top 10 OWASP vulnerabilities that your application may contain, such as SQL injection.
SAST tools scan your application`s source code, identify existing (or may exist) vulnerabilities, and search the call stack to see where the vulnerability may have occurred. SCA tools analyze the open source component by identifying software licenses, obsolete dependencies, known vulnerabilities, and potential exploits in a code base so that DevOps can manage its security risks and license compliance. In addition, composition analysis can be performed and extended to newer architectures, including containerized environments, to automate the detection of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in your containers and those disguised in public ledgers (Docker Hub) in the project. CSA tools perform two main tasks. The first is to scan images for vulnerabilities. Look for layers in an image and look for security issues in the components that make up the base operating system and the software loaded on it. For example, if an image is created from a base Ubuntu image running an Apache web server, CSA identifies all known vulnerabilities. DevSecOps adoption helps security professionals understand how to successfully integrate security in an automated way without slowing down development, while DevOps can focus on what`s important: building and building. In this blog, we explain the various automated application security testing tools commonly used in the agile development lifecycle and when to use them to ensure a secure software development lifecycle (SDLC). Learn how to use Trivy and provide a path to full business coverage in this on-demand webinar. No matter how well developers follow the latest guidelines for secure coding or how perfect their intentions are, production code almost always contains at least one security issue.
Developers are also only human, and if they`re trying to balance the long and growing list of potential software vulnerabilities with the growing pressure for faster release cycles, something is needed. With the SBOM completed in hand, teams can be notified of newly released vulnerabilities impacting previously scanned projects. Therefore, SCA tools backed by appropriate cybersecurity research can be critical to responding to zero-day threats. Knowing which of your projects or applications are affected by new vulnerabilities is a great advantage of software composition analysis and can help speed up remediation and minimize the potential attack window if an exploit for related vulnerabilities is in place. SAST tools scan an organization`s internally written code for potential vulnerabilities based on a set of predefined rules. SCA tools track an organization`s open source components and identify whether they contain known vulnerabilities. When vulnerabilities are discovered, SCA tools provide detailed information about the vulnerabilities so that developers can quickly fix them. Open source vulnerabilities pose additional security risks. Open source is accessible everywhere and is used everywhere. This fact has not escaped the attention of hackers, who can access publicly available information about known open source vulnerabilities as well as detailed information about their exploitation. For example, as soon as a vulnerability is reported, the open source community often publishes a way to exploit it.
A software security program that includes both SAST and SCA is more comprehensive. Organizations that adopt this approach achieve results: It is important for teams to be aware of the attitude of their application environments. By providing early and frequent feedback on license compliance and vulnerabilities, software composition analysis helps mitigate some of the risks associated with using open source components in applications. While 100% patch rates are unlikely, part of improving security posture is knowing the risk and weighing the cost of fixing a vulnerability. After generating an open source SBOM, SCA tools compare versions of detected components to databases of known open source vulnerabilities, such as the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). This can be done during security testing of dedicated applications, but should be done as early as possible in the development process to avoid introducing vulnerable components into the development pipeline. In my reference architecture, you can see the acronym CVA, which stands for Container Vulnerability Analysis. I will update this in the future to be Container Security Analysis (CSA). This term refers to the analysis of containers and images (Docker, etc.) for security vulnerabilities. DAST tools usually have a crawl feature to try to find missed pages, and then they start performing fuzzing and dynamic analysis. Why is OSSM/SCA the most important acronym you will see? This is the biggest move you can make from a security perspective to improve code quality. The 2019 State of the Software Supply Chain report found that between 85 and 97 percent of a code base comes from external vendors.
Think. Your development teams code 3-15% of all applications created by your organization. The rest is created by a community that is not under the control of your organizational strategies. Aqua`s Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) provides powerful SCA capabilities to scan containers, detect open source and third-party components, and identify associated vulnerabilities. Aqua`s container image scanning capabilities can be integrated with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps workflows to automatically trigger analytics when containers are integrated or archived in registries. Automatically configure and enforce policies to ensure that vulnerable container images are not transferred to production. These security tools are the top four controls you should look at to detect vulnerabilities in your code when you start adopting DevSecOps practices. Each tool performs different types of analysis on your application code, binaries, or running instances to identify security issues. While you may not need all four to implement automated security controls, you`ll eventually encounter each of these tools in one form or another.
The first and most important of all the security acronyms you will come across is OSSM, also known as OSS, which stands for Open Source Software Management.