Code that an organization’s developers create is only the beginning of modern software development. In fact, first-party code is likely to be only a small proportion of an application – sometimes as little as 10% of the application’s artifact ecosystem. An enterprise’s software supply chain is made of many parts, from many sources: open source packages, commercial software, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) files, and more.

Not all of the recognizable risks in your software supply chain can be identified by their known vulnerabilities recorded as CVEs. A component that is outdated or inactive may present risks to your application that no one has had cause to investigate. Yet these components could still harbor threats.

The JFrog Security Research team continuously monitors reported vulnerabilities in open-source software (OSS) to help our customers and the wider community be aware of potential software supply chain security threats and their impact. In doing so, we often notice important trends and key learnings worth highlighting.

The JFrog Security team recently competed in the Pwn2Own Miami 2022 hacking competition which focuses on Industrial Control Systems (ICS) security. One of our research targets for the competition was the Unified Automation C++-based OPC UA Server SDK. Other than the vulnerabilities we disclosed as part of the pwn2own competition, we managed to find and disclose eight additional vulnerabilities to the vendor. These vulnerabilities were fixed in the SDK in version 1.7.7.