Many people will have heard of the SPDX project through the work on the SPDX License List. This list of canonical identifiers for various software licenses is used in a huge range of developer-focused software, from Snyk to GitHub. But the SPDX project, which is part of the Linux Foundation, has a much broader focus on providing an open standard for communicating software bill of material information.
In a world that is constantly evaluating costs, it is little wonder that there is an increasing demand for cost-effective solutions to business problems. In the real world, this means ‘free,’ and in the digital marketplace, it means ‘open source.’
Open Source software provides the community source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. OSS is so ubiquitous that it’s even on other planets. This post is for the people who run these projects.
Last summer, we announced our plan to expand our partnership with Trend Micro to provide security operations teams visibility and tracking of vulnerabilities and license risks in open source components. The long-standing partnership already includes container image security scanning that leverages Snyk’s proprietary vulnerability database.
Open source helps developers build faster. But who’s making sure these open source dependencies (sometimes years out of development) stay secure? In a recent npm security research activity, Snyk uncovered a total of 8 npm packages which matched a specific malicious code vector of attack. This specific attack vector of the malicious packages included packages which had pre/post install scripts, which allowed them to run arbitrary commands when installed.
We are happy to announce Snyk Open Source support for GitHub Security Code Scanning, enabling you to automatically scan your open source dependencies for security vulnerabilities and license issues, as well as view results directly from within GitHub’s Security tab! A key ingredient of Snyk’s developer-first approach is integrating Snyk’s security data into the exact same processes that developers are using, whether this is within a developer’s IDE or a Git-based workflow.
Spencer Pearlman, Security Researcher at Detectify, presented A Hacker’s Approach to Finding Security Bugs in Open Source Software in a partnered webinar with friends at Debricked. Securing modern web applications takes new approaches, and this includes looking at it from a hacker’s perspective. Here are highlights from the presentation on how tech teams can apply the same hacker mindset to discover vulnerabilities in open-source software in their tech stack.
The recent SolarWinds breach highlights a new paradigm in the Software Supply Chain. When compared simply to the code itself without any additional tools, Proprietary Code is no more secure than Open Source. By contrast, many would argue that Open Source Code is more secure due to a faster fix/patch/update cycle and the pervasive access to source code (Clarke, Dorwin, and Nash, n.d.).
Whether you’re a developer or a security engineer, Software Composition Analysis—or SCA for short—is a term you will start to hear of more and more. If you haven’t already, that is. The reason for this is simple. Your company is increasingly relying on open source software and containers to develop its applications and by doing so is introducing risk in the form of security vulnerabilities and license violations.
