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Software has made a lot of progress in terms of speed over the last several years, with new features emerging at least once a week and sometimes even once a day to meet the demands of rapidly evolving end-users. While this rapidly developing software assists businesses in keeping up with the competition, it also presents many potential risks to the security of the applications themselves.
All software applications utilize many, typically many hundreds of third-party libraries, open-source libraries, and other external components. Because of this, tracking what is in each application is becoming increasingly more complex.
An SBOM, or Software Bill of Materials, is an approach changing the way organizations think about software security. Instead of viewing security as just another checklist to complete (and before release), SBOMs allow organizations to thoroughly understand what their software contains throughout the entire development process. When used in association with DevSecOps practices, organizations are able to enjoy a more secure, transparent, and manageable software development experience.
SBOMs help developers to be able to easily identify risk, respond to any vulnerabilities, and maintain user trust in their application throughout the entire software development life cycle. With software supply chain attacks rising at an alarming rate, utilizing SBOMs in your DevSecOps workflow is no longer an optional method for achieving security but rather a necessary component of today's development practices.
Understanding SBOMs and Why They Matter
A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is like an ingredient listing on a food product. Food product labeling enables consumers to see what ingredients are found in their product of choice. Similarly, an SBOM provides the complete list of software components that are used to create an application.
Whenever possible, an SBOM should contain:
- Open source libraries
- Third-party packages
- Frameworks
- Version of the component
- Availability of the license for the component
- Dependencies for each component
When developers, security professionals, and companies have visibility into every component that has been utilized within the creation of an application, they are able to identify very quickly if there are components that are considered vulnerable or outdated.
Discovering whether or not a given application has been exposed to a new disclosed vulnerability would take a longer and more manual process in the absence of an SBOM. Developers would spend hours or, in some cases, days researching their projects to determine the presence of the vulnerable library. On the other hand, when developers are using an SBOM, they are able to answer these questions much more quickly.
Why DevSecOps Needs Better Software Visibility
DevSecOps focuses on building security into every stage of the software development lifecycle. When viewed as part of a practical guide to app security, integrating SBOMs helps development and security teams gain continuous visibility into software components, making it easier to identify vulnerabilities before they become serious risks.
Many applications of today use an increasingly large amount of external software. In fact, developers only write a small portion of the code for most projects. The majority of the code used in a typical project comes from open-source libraries, APIs, frameworks, and other reusable components created by others.
The Growing Challenge of Software Dependencies
While leveraging existing libraries can help expedite development, these dependencies also introduce new risks. Each dependency could potentially contain vulnerabilities, outdated versions, licensing issues, or hidden dependencies.
As project sizes continue to increase, manually tracking these relationships becomes almost impossible. A single application may have many hundreds of interconnected dependencies to consider, most of which are updated regularly.
Although creating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for anything that can be represented as a software component, there is no requirement for maintaining an up-to-date SBOM. There is no longer any need to make assumptions about what is inside an app. All teams will have access to an accurate and up-to-date inventory of all software components as the application changes during development.
Strengthening the Software Supply Chain
Organizations are also increasingly aligning their software security practices with NIST software supply chain security guidance, which recommends improving visibility into software components and strengthening the integrity of the software supply chain. SBOMs play a key role in helping development teams meet these recommendations by providing a complete inventory of application dependencies.
It can often be very challenging to find these compromised components since they get distributed through trusted software updates.
SBOMs will help organizations gain greater transparency into their software supply chains by enabling them to answer 4 critical questions without wasting time:
- Which applications contain a vulnerable component
- What version of the component is currently deployed
- Where did the component originate from
- Are there any safer versions available to deploy
Having timely access to this information enables an organization’s security teams to respond much more quickly when new threats arise.
Integrating SBOMs into DevSecOps Workflows
Implementing SBOMs within DevSecOps does not require the addition of an additional manual step but rather calls for ongoing automatic SBOM creation and updating through all phases of the software development lifecycle.
Code Development:
The SBOM creation process begins during the actual coding of the application, since many modern development tools can automatically identify newly added dependencies as part of the project's creation when a developer adds a new library to the project.
This allows developers to have immediate visibility into the components they are adding and will enable them to select trusted and well-maintained libraries before issues arise from using them in their application. In addition, while developing functionality, developers can review the license information for these components to help mitigate unnecessary security risks prior to the completion of development.
Continuous Integration:
Once code moves from development into a continuous integration pipeline, SBOM creation is included as part of the automated build process. Every time a build is created within the CI pipeline, an updated list of all components in the software build is generated. In addition, automated security scanning tools scan every component produced as part of the build for any known vulnerabilities by querying various vulnerability databases.
If a critical vulnerability is detected, developers will be notified immediately, or the build will be halted until the vulnerability has been resolved. This helps to prevent any software containing known vulnerabilities from continuing down the deployment pipeline.
During Continuous Deployment
Security testing doesn't indicate that security is simply concluded. Sometimes, applications that were deemed functional and secure one day can become completely vulnerable to exploits the next when new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) get released.
Through the integration of Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) paired with Continuous Deployment, organizations are able to maintain up-to-date visibility into their deployed products. As a result, when an existing product/component has a new CVE against it, security teams are able to act immediately based on automated alerts instead of being subjected to long waiting periods until a manual review can take place.
This continuous visibility allows for quicker patching, less exposure, and stronger overall security of production environments.
Final Thoughts
With the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of software, it has become essential that every aspect of an application be secured. Today’s applications are built using many different third-party libraries and open-source packages, which means that organizations need to have clear visibility into their software dependencies in order to mitigate security risks. SBOMs help provide this critical visibility.
Integrating SBOMs into your organization’s DevSecOps workflows provides you with a better understanding of the components that make up your applications and also helps you to find and fix vulnerabilities, react to new threats, and maintain compliance across the entire software lifecycle. Instead of responding to security issues after they have occurred, your development and security teams can discover and address risks much earlier in the process.
Going forward, it is likely that SBOMs will become an industry standard for secure software development. As the threat landscape continues to change and regulatory compliance becomes more stringent, organizations that embrace SBOM-based DevSecOps processes will be well-positioned to develop secure, resilient, and trustworthy applications. Organizations that integrate SBOMs today are likely to have a significant competitive advantage over those that delay doing so. Just about meeting current security needs; it's about preparing development workflows for the future of software security.
