The JFrog Security Research team released the findings of a recent investigation wherein they uncovered thousands of publicly exposed, active API tokens. This was accomplished while the team tested the new Secrets Detection feature in the company’s JFrog Advanced Security solution, part of JFrog Xray.

Today marks an exciting day for JFrog and a substantial step forward towards ensuring end-to-end software supply chain security. JFrog Advanced Security is our unique approach for DevOps-centric security, and the only solution that was built especially for today’s modern DevOps workflows.

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 A component that is outdated or inactive may present risks to your application that no one has had cause to investigate.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.

Go to any DevOps or security conference today and you’re likely to see “Secure your Software Supply Chain” blazoned across most booths in some form or another. And that’s for good reason. Recent data shows that supply chain attacks have more than doubled in 2021, a trend that is likely to continue. Leading companies are actively rethinking their approach to how to develop and release software.

SecOps demands vigilance, but it requires visibility, too. With JFrog’s latest integration for Xray with AWS Security Hub, you can help make sure that discovered vulnerabilities are not just seen, but quickly acted on. AWS Security Hub is the cloud security posture management service available to AWS users. It provides central security administration across AWS accounts, performing security best practice checks, aggregating alerts, and enabling automated remediation.

Shifting security left means preventing developers from using unacceptably vulnerable software supply chain components as early as possible: before their first build. By helping assure that no build is ever created using packages with known vulnerabilities, this saves substantial remediation costs in advance. Some JFrog customers restrict the use of open source software (OSS) packages to only those that have been screened and approved by their security team.

The JFrog Security research team continuously monitors popular open-source software (OSS) repositories with our automated tooling to avert potential software supply chain security threats, and reports any vulnerabilities or malicious packages discovered to repository maintainers and the wider community. At times, we notice trends that are worth analyzing and learning from.