WhiteSource Acquires Diffend to Secure Open Source Supply Chains

WhiteSource this week announced it has acquired Diffend as part of an expended effort to discover malware that has been deliberately injected into open source software by a contributor acting in bad faith.

Company CEO Rami Sass said cybercriminals are increasingly trying to compromise software supply chains that today depend heavily on open source projects. The Diffend platform surfaces anomalous contributor behavior that would be indicative of someone trying to compromise the integrity of a project, said Sass.

Previously, WhiteSource provided a tool that would discover malware that had been inadvertently included in open source software. WhiteSource now plans to add the Diffend tools, now known as WhiteSource Diffend, for free to a portfolio of security tools that many organizations have already incorporated into DevSecOps workflows. Earlier this month, the company raised an additional $75 million in financing that, in part, was used to fund this acquisition.

As cybercriminals begin to target software supply chains, many of them are taking aim at open source software that is likely to be adopted by a broad spectrum of organizations, noted Sass. The challenge is that bad actors have become adept at embedding malware in software components in ways that are difficult to detect, he said. However, spikes in activity from, for example, a new contributor to the project might warrant additional investigation, Saas added.

These type of attacks, unfortunately, will require the maintainers of open source software to vet more closely who is allowed to contribute to the project, added SaaS. New contributors that might have once been greeted with open arms need to now be initially met with a modicum of paranoia, Saas said.

That level of suspicion will be considerably higher if that contributor is located in a country that has a reputation for trying to compromise the security of both adversaries and companies that have intellectual property they might want to surreptitiously acquire.

In the wake of some recent high-profile breaches involving software supply chain compromises, organizations are revisiting their application development processes. Cybersecurity teams are now asking developers to vet any external code that is incorporated within an application. Most applications regularly incorporate both open source and commercial components that developers assume have been vetted for malware when, in most cases, they have not. The Diffend platform, for example, aided in the detecting of 60 suspicious packages found in Rubygems, an open source platform that makes it easier to package software built using Ruby programming tools.

It’s unclear how increased inspection of software components may impact application developer productivity. However, given how dependent organizations are on software today, the discovery of malware downstream that compromises the security of the application is potentially catastrophic.

Sass said it’s doubtful these security concerns will lead to decreased reliance on open source software in general. There is no real alternative for efficiently driving software innovation, he said. The challenge now is finding a way to make sure all that innovation continues to occur as securely as possible.