Google is proposing organizations adopt a framework for securing the integrity of software artifacts across a software supply chain.

Kim Lewandowski, a product manager for open source software security at Google, said the Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) is based on an internal framework, known as binary authorization for Borg, that the company has been employing now for more than eight years to secure its software. Borg is the name Google attached to the platform for building and deploying applications upon which Kubernetes is based.

In its current form, SLSA is a set of guidelines that identifies how to attain four different levels of application security. The goal, however, is to create a framework that will automatically generate auditable metadata that can be fed into policy engines to create a SLSA certification.

The lowest level of SLSA requires that the build process be fully scripted or automated and generates metadata that enables provenance to be created. At the highest level, SLSA requires a two-person review of all changes made during a hermetic, reproducible build process. At the highest SLSA security level, organizations should be able to assure others that their software supply chain has not been compromised, said Lewandowski.

In the wake of a recent series of high-profile breaches of software supply chains, the level of scrutiny being applied to how software is constructed has increased significantly. In theory, at least, developers have assumed more responsibility for application security as part of an overall shift left that provided them with more programmatic control over IT environments. As a result, cybercriminals are now focused on compromising either the credentials of developers as part of an effort to insert malware into application as it is developed, or they are trying to exploit vulnerabilities that developers have inadvertently created by programmatically misconfiguring infrastructure.

DevSecOps best practices are, of course, being adopted to teach developers how to better secure their application environments. The issue is that not enough developers are learning how to secure applications fast enough. The volume of attacks against the software supply chain continues to grow at a rate that is now much faster than organizations can thwart simply by educating developers. In some cases, organizations are once again empowering cybersecurity teams to make sure software supply chains are secure regardless of the potential impact on the rate at which applications are being developed.

Google is trying to promote adoption of SLSA as a framework for securing both open source and proprietary application code, said Lewandowski. There’s no silver bullet for securing software, but a framework that ultimately automates as many of the security processes as possible within the context of a DevOps workflow would go a long way toward hardening the software supply chain, noted Lewandowski.

SLSA is being put forward as a response to a cybersecurity executive order issued by President Biden that, among other things, tasks the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to consult with federal agencies, the private sector, academia and other stakeholders in identifying standards, tools, best practices and other guidelines to enhance software supply chain security. Given the level of dependencies that exist across those software supply chains, that executive order, to varying degrees, now applies to almost any entity that builds software for an organization that, on some level, interacts with the Federal government.