WhiteSource has added the Microsoft Azure DevOps platform to the list of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms its open source vulnerability scanning tools natively supports.
Susan St. Clair, director of product management for WhiteSource, said while developers are always encouraged to scan for vulnerabilities, it’s more effective if organizations implement scanning by default every time there is a merge request. That approach reduces friction because organizations become much less dependent on developers to scan for vulnerabilities within the context of a larger DevSecOps workflow, she added.
WhiteSource also provides a merge confidence feature that uses crowdsourced data to show how likely it is that an open source component can be updated without breaking the build. Merge confidence includes data on upgrade age, adoption and compatibility to create a confidence score.
The WhiteSource integrations make it possible for DevOps teams to detect all open source components being used and automatically enforce security policies directly from their repository. DevOps teams are provided with vulnerability and misconfiguration alerts and license violations along with detailed remediation guidance, including suggested fixes and prioritization advice, within an existing workflow versus being required to switch to a tool that has a separate user interface (UI) they need to learn.
Should a merge request introduce a new error, the developer is given immediate feedback to resolve any newly introduced vulnerabilities before the request is completed. That approach to separating feature branches and mainline branches prevents interruptions to workflows. The enterprise edition of the WhiteSource tool also automatically generates pull requests in the repository to update vulnerable open source components to the lowest non-vulnerable version.
WhiteSource also supports code repositories such as GitHub, GitHub Packages, JFrog, Bitbucket and GitLab. The Azure DevOps platform is gaining traction as more application development projects are being managed via the cloud following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, noted St. Clair.
As more organizations begin to embrace DevSecOps workflows each of them will need to decide how far left they want to shift responsibility for application security. In theory, each developer is now being held more accountable for every one of their applications that gets deployed in a production environment. In practice, most developers lack the expertise required to ensure applications are secure.
There are, of course, more concerns being raised about the security of software supply chains that include open source software in the wake of the recent disclosure of zero-day vulnerabilities in the widely-used Log4j logging tool. Many of the maintainers of smaller open source projects lack the resources required to ensure there are no inadvertent vulnerabilities that could be exploited by cybercriminals. More challenging still, many developers may have used an older version of that software that has known vulnerabilities.
It’s not clear how open source software will ultimately be made more secure. In the meantime, however, it’s clear the onus for ensuring the security of that software is on the DevOps teams that employ it.
