SCA tools automatically detect the open source components in your applications and help you manage the different aspects related to your open source usage. Open source components have become an integral part of today’s software development processes. Open source enables companies to build better products, faster. After all, why should you re-invent the wheel when you can just download it from GitHub?
However, it’s still your responsibility to ensure that all of the components in your products are secure and compliant with your company’s policies.
The problem is that verifying that each and every open source component used is secure and complies with your company’s policies has become increasingly complex. That’s because information about open source components is scattered across hundreds of sources with varied levels of credibility, and most databases are not easily searchable.
So how can you get the control you need over your open source usage? Through automation! And this is where Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools come in.
Most SCA tools fall into one of the two following categories: governance tools which enforce policies in real time and generate reports, or developers’ tools which alert developers on issues within their development environment and provide remediation guidance.
Each category has important benefits, but is strongly focused on its target audience. Only combining both types of tools can provide a solution that addresses the needs of the entire organization. Security, DevOps, and legal teams get the visibility and control that they need, while developers get the tools that they need in order to prevent and fix open source security and compliance issues.
DevSecOps, sometimes called DevOps Security or rugged DevOps aims to integrate security into every stage of the development cycle—from planning and design to development, testing, deployment, production, and maintenance. SCA tools can help to enable a DevSecOps culture by helping developers, IT, security and legal teams share responsibility over open source risks.
In the past, management would sometimes enforce open source security standards and block components from use, without the awareness or involvement of development teams. Other times, developers would use their own tools to detect and avoid open source vulnerabilities, with no visibility to other teams or external auditors. Adopting an SCA technology that provides both developer-focused tools and governance solutions, puts developers, IT, security, and legal on the same page.
Which capabilities does your organization need in order to benefit from open source usage, without being exposed to open source security vulnerabilities and legal risk? Below are four essential capabilities, and associated challenges you may run into as you try to implement them.
You must be able to discover open source components with known vulnerabilities as early as possible, when remediation is easiest.
Once a vulnerability is publicly disclosed, you are in a race against hackers to fix it. If you don’t know that you are using a vulnerable open source component, you can’t win this race.
Knowledge about open source vulnerabilities is scattered across multiple sources, many of them are under-the-radar, with different levels of credibility. You need access to all available information to address known vulnerabilities.
Many SCA tools frequently raise false alarms, making it more difficult to act on the data.
It’s not enough to check at the gate. New components are introduced at every stage of the SDLC.
New vulnerabilities can be discovered in components that were previously thought to be secure.
In order to mitigate open source risks, it’s essential to remediate open source vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered. However, in most cases it’s impractical to fix all vulnerabilities, and some require major development work. You must prioritize vulnerabilities, understand which ones represent a real risk, and provide development and IT teams with the information that they need in order to quickly fix the most critical vulnerabilities first. You must also help teams shift left and discover vulnerabilities earlier, making remediation easier.
When a new vulnerability is discovered, you must fix it fast before hackers exploit it. However, many remediations require major development work.
In order to make remediation efficient, you must be able to quickly prioritize vulnerabilities that matter.
The best remediation is avoiding insecure components when they are initially selected for a project. This requires integrating security at early stages of development.
Once a vulnerability is discovered, it’s difficult to pinpoint where it is referenced in the code
In order to fix an open source vulnerability, developers need instructions and patches.
It’s crucial to identify which open source components are in use in your software. To fully manage open source security, licensing, and compliance issues, you must gain visibility into open source code usage across all stages of the SDLC—from the selection stage to development, deployment and production stages.
Developers spend precious time checking licenses and security and requesting approval. These processes can be automated.
Automated tools must support all of the languages and frameworks used in your organization to accurately track open source components.
Information about open source components, versions and licenses is spread across hundreds of sources. Tracking it manually is extremely complex.
Most open source components are dependant on other open source components, creating complex dependency trees.
You must establish an open source usage policy, and block inappropriate or overly restrictive open source licenses. You must also ensure that you are meeting license requirements for all of the open source components used in your software. Management, security, legal teams, and third parties such as investors conducting due diligence need complete visibility over open source licensing.
Applications use thousands of open source components. Managing their licenses manually creates overhead and slows down development.
Even when using automated tools, there must be a way to perform a review for some types of licenses.
Less advanced automated SCA tools do not always accurately detect licenses. Associating libraries and licenses is not trivial. Missing problematic licenses can incur major costs later on.
Some SCA tools raise false alarms, placing a burden on teams, or miss problematic licenses leading to liability.
Automation of open source vulnerability management and license compliance is critical to solving the challenges we outlined above. However, automated tools have their limitations.
Previous generations of SCA tools could detect open source components and tell organizations that they have vulnerabilities, but were not able to identify the potential impact of those vulnerabilities. This required security and development teams to invest many resources in investigation and response to a large number of vulnerability reports.
Research has shown that of the vulnerabilities discovered, 70-85% were not critical, because the vulnerable open source code was not actually accessed or used by the organization’s proprietary code.
Mend pioneered the next generation of SCA with Effective Usage Analysis. This technology doesn’t just tell you what open source components you have, but also how you use them. It lets you hone in on the 15-30% of open source vulnerabilities that are actually in active use within your product.
It also shows exactly where a vulnerable functionality is referenced within the code, making it much easier for developers to fix vulnerabilities.
Effective Usage Analysis provides automatic prioritization that can reduce remediation efforts, and help teams fix critical vulnerabilities much faster.
We have covered numerous considerations for selecting an SCA tool for your organization. The bottom line is that you should select an SCA tool that enables you to minimize risk and reduces the effort for all of your teams—from management, legal and security, through ops, developers and QA engineers.
A one-stop-shop for all of your open source usage regardless of your languages or environments, including containers and serverless. We also support all groups in your organization: Security, Developers, DevOps, Legal, and Management.
Focus on what really matters. We help you to prioritize the security vulnerabilities that actually impact your products, and ensure there are no false positives.
Alerts are great, and we also provide the fix. Automatically generate fix pull requests, get direct links to suggested fixes, optimize remediation with full trace analysis and initiate automated workflows including issue tracker integration.
We believe the only way to use open source without compromising on security or quality — and without slowing down your developers — is to make this complex process of risk mitigation as simple as possible.
Using open source code should be easy.
That’s why we created Mend. Our technology takes care of the heavy lifting that comes with open source usage. We alert you only when something demands your attention, providing you with all the information that you need to make the right choices.
The Mend platform continuously detects all of the open source components used in your products. It then compares these components against Mend’s database. This database is built by collecting up-to-date information about open source components from numerous sources, including various vulnerability feeds and hundreds of community and developer resources.
The Mend platform is designed for security and compliance professionals, to give managers everything that they need in order to control and manage the open source usage within their organization. It allows them to enforce their policies automatically throughout the SDLC, get real-time alerts on critical issues, and generate up-to-date reports.
It includes a set of tools that fit into the developers’ ecosystem, empowering them to make educated choices, speed up integration, and quickly find and remediate problematic open source components. Because knowledgeable developers make better software.
