ActiveState today announced it is making all tiers of its ActiveState Artifact Repository service available for free for a limited time. The move aims to enable organizations to better secure open source software components incorporated within applications.
Loreli Cadapan, vice president of product for ActiveState, said the ActiveState Artifact Repository exposes a set of curated instances of open source software for creating binaries that are validated to be secure. That capability reduces the likelihood vulnerabilities will be inadvertently introduced into application environments by developers that have downloaded open source modules from repositories that may contain compromised code, she added.
In addition, the ActiveState Artifact Repository also makes it possible to automatically generate software bills of materials (SBOMs) that identify which software components were used to build an application after all the code used to construct an application is stored in the repository, Cadapan noted.
ActiveState’s repository is delivered as a cloud service to organizations that would otherwise have to build their own. Cadapan noted that the goal is to make managing and securing software supply chains simpler when more attacks are being launched against them.
Most organizations have limited visibility into how they are consuming open source software. It’s become apparent many organizations have no idea what software components have been incorporated across their software supply chain. As a result, when a vulnerability is discovered, there’s no easy way for them to know whether they are impacted.
However, awareness of this issue has risen, thanks to an executive order issued by the Biden administration which requires federal agencies to have an SBOM for every application they employ by next summer. The executive order was issued in the wake of a zero-day vulnerability in the Log4j tool discovered late last year that is widely used to create logs within Java applications. Many organizations are still looking for all the vulnerable instances of Log4j in their application environments. SBOMs must provide a list of the “ingredients” used to create an application to make it easier to find any component that might one day be similarly affected by a zero-day vulnerability.
Organizations that want to implement a similar SBOM policy will spend massive amounts of time cataloging software on an ongoing basis. Every time an application is updated, there will be a need to once again verify what components are being employed within the context of larger DevSecOps workflows.
SBOMs will undoubtedly play a critical role in improving overall application security. However, having an SBOM is not the same thing as operationalizing it. Organizations are ultimately hoping to be able to use an SBOM to decide whether to green-light the deployment of an application, so DevOps teams should expect to be required to not only provide an SBOM but also continuously update it. The challenge, of course, will be determining how many internal resources to devote to that effort versus relying on external platforms to manage that process.
