Why reinvent the wheel when you can borrow from the best tools and let them reinvent it for you? As companies race to innovate, they’re increasingly tapping into third-party libraries, open-source components, and external APIs to fast-track development. But when you integrate someone else’s code, you also incorporate their risks.
70% of apps have vulnerable third-party code. SolarWinds was a seismic event, but it wasn’t an outlier. In a world where speed to market is king, and external dependencies are imperative for overall efficiency, how do you ensure your apps are secure and resilient against supply chain threats? It starts with building apps based on a secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC).
What is SSDLC and Why It’s Critical for the Software Supply Chain
SSDLC weaves security practices directly into every phase of software development, from planning to deployment. A traditional SDLC considers security either at sporadic checkpoints (or, just as commonly, as an afterthought), whereas an SSDLC integrates security controls and risk management throughout.
By adopting SSDLC, your business can create resilient software to internal and external threats, lowering the likelihood of finding costly vulnerabilities later in the software’s lifecycle.
A well-implemented SSDLC addresses the nuanced and hard-to-see risks in today’s software supply chains. Incorporating processes like SAST testing and Software Composition Analysis (SCA) during the coding and build phases helps detect vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and SQL injection. Peer reviews also help identify insecure coding practices, such as hard-coded credentials or insecure API designs, before these gaps reach production.
Plus, SSDLC practices promote rigorous change management, ensuring that library and component updates are tested for security impacts. Proper change management helps prevent problems like the recent Crowdstrike outage, where poor handling of a piece of code rippled across the supply chain. It impacted entire sectors and economies, even causing airport delays.
Challenges in Building a Secure Software Supply Chain
1. Dependency Sprawl
Dependency sprawl creates an intricate web where a single component may introduce a hidden vulnerability. Managing this complexity means tracking and assessing each component’s security posture, understanding how each component interacts, and applying updates/patches on time. With hundreds or even thousands of dependencies in some apps, a single missed update or overlooked vulnerability can lead to supply chain security risks that may not be discovered until it’s too late.
2. Visibility Gaps
Most organizations lack the tools and processes to gain insight into the entire lifecycle of these components—from initial integration to ongoing updates. This lack of visibility makes it difficult to determine if a library has been tampered with, whether through outdated cryptographic algorithms or malicious code injections. Additionally, new vulnerabilities may emerge after integration.
3. Slow Response Times
Slow response times are often due to a lack of context or understanding of where and how vulnerable components are used within the software stack. For instance, a vulnerability in a widely used open-source library may not immediately indicate which parts of the application are at risk, causing delays in remediation. This challenge worsens in complex CI/CD environments, where DevOps engineers, release managers, and QA analysts frequently deploy changes.
4. Zero-day Vulnerabilities
Zero-day vulnerabilities in third-party libraries or newly discovered flaws present another formidable challenge – high-profile incidents like the CVE 2023-2033 exploit prove this point. Detecting these issues is difficult because they lie dormant until publicly disclosed or exploited in the wild. You need to go beyond traditional SCA to find more advanced solutions that monitor unusual behavior or unverified sources, and code binaries, and use other techniques to protect against sophisticated supply chain attacks.
SSDLC: 7 Steps to Create a Secure Software Supply Chain
1. Define Security Requirements Early
Start by setting precise security requirements from the beginning. Define these so developers and DevOps engineers can directly reference them in code or configuration files when looking for external services or components to integrate with their apps.
YAML files can store configuration details for your security standards, like authentication or encryption protocols. These files make it easier for developers and DevOps engineers to reference and implement these requirements directly in their build and deployment processes. You want security standards to be consistently applied across all environments.
2. Perform Threat Modeling
Threat modeling involves creating a structured representation of how your application works and identifying the various assets, potential threats, and attack vectors that could compromise these assets. By involving software architects and security analysts and leveraging tools like Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool or Lucidchart, you can map out how data flows through your application and where threats might emerge.
For example, a threat model might flag risks like SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS) if an external component or service handles user input. Or, a threat modeling session might reveal that your development team’s approach to using open-source components is sound, but how they pull those components into the build process is risky. This insight enables security teams to design controls that reduce risks in developers’ workflows, such as enforcing private registries.
3. Map Features to Requirements
Feature creep—adding unplanned features during development—can lead to significant security risks. By mapping features to requirements, you create a structured approach that discourages unnecessary additions. Your team must justify each new feature in terms of security and usability, which minimizes the likelihood of introducing vulnerabilities through untested or poorly integrated functionalities.
Establish traceability between your mapped features and requirements. Tracking tools like Jama Connect or Azure DevOps maintain a clear record of which features address specific security requirements. This transparency helps prevent feature creep, as it becomes easier to evaluate whether new features align with existing requirements and security goals.
4. Automate Vulnerability Detection in Third-Party Dependencies
With modern apps relying heavily on external libraries, tools like Dependency-Check (for Java and .NET) or npm audit (for Node.js) can automatically scan dependencies for known vulnerabilities and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines. This integration lets you detect and block risky vendor-related components before they reach production. For example, in a Node.js environment, you can add a simple npm audit script in your CI pipeline to catch vulnerabilities.
You can even configure things up to fail builds if critical vulnerabilities are detected, stopping the deployment of insecure software early in the release process. By reducing manual effort, these automated checks help security engineers and DevSecOps teams maintain a consistent security posture across various environments.
5. Integrate Security Checks Into CI/CD Pipelines
Integrating security checks into CI/CD pipelines makes security a fundamental part of the software delivery process. It allows developers and DevOps engineers to catch and fix vulnerabilities before the code reaches production. By adding automated scripts, teams can validate configurations, scan for exposed secrets, and enforce secure coding practices.
For example, using a bash script to reject commits with hardcoded credentials or checking for vulnerable libraries ensures that each build meets security standards:
# Reject commits with hardcoded secrets
if grep -r “password|secret” src/; then
echo “Error: Hardcoded secrets found. Remove before proceeding.”
exit 1
fi
6. Monitor Supply Chain Components for Emerging Vulnerabilities
Companies often become exposed to known vulnerabilities for a long time because they haven’t monitored their software supply chains for emerging weaknesses. A case in point demonstrating this lax approach is that two years after the historic Log4Shell vulnerability, almost 2 in 5 apps still ran vulnerable versions of the Apache log4j logging utility.
Stay vigilant by continuously monitoring your software supply chain for emerging threats. Implement tools like Dependabot for GitHub security or OWASP Dependency-Track to track new vulnerability disclosures in real-time. These tools can automate notifications for updates and security patches, ensuring you’re never caught off guard by a newly discovered flaw.
7. Conduct Contextual Risk Analysis
Not all vulnerabilities carry the same weight. Understanding the context in which a third-party component operates—the vulnerability reachability, criticality, and potential impact—enables your teams to prioritize their security efforts more effectively. By implementing contextual risk analysis, teams can assess the risks associated with different dependencies based on their unique environments. For example, a library used in a public-facing application may pose a greater risk than one used solely in an internal tool.
Myrror’s Reachability and Exploitability Engine identifies which vulnerabilities are actively exploitable within the specific code context, enabling your team to focus their remediation efforts on the most critical risks in their supply chain. Contextual risk analysis facilitates collaboration and alignment among stakeholders, supporting teams in creating a unified approach to security.
Navigating Complexity with Confidence
As you piece together the complex puzzle of your software supply chain, remember that visibility is your greatest ally. By approaching software development through the lens of SSDLC, you cultivate a proactive security culture that identifies vulnerabilities early, whether internal or external libraries and services. However, securing your software supply chain requires more than basic scans and checks.
With its three intelligent engines, Myrror transcends conventional security measures to unveil vulnerability reachability, offering detailed remediation guidance tailored to your specific environment. It doesn’t stop there; Myrror’s Binary-to-Source Engine detects malicious packages without prior knowledge of existing vulnerabilities, ensuring you’re one step ahead of the most sophisticated threat actors. Unlock a new level of resilience against emerging supply chain attacks with Myrror. Book a demo.
