Software Composition Analysis (SCA) is an essential tool in your cybersecurity arsenal if you use open source libraries, components, and dependencies, which 97% of commercial codebases do.
The widespread use of open source has fueled innovation and accelerated development cycles. It has also introduced risks and challenges for security teams and developers:
- Vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed and therefore easy to exploit
- Hackers can use one vulnerability to exploit a number of companies — as many as are using that particular library or component
- Vulnerable open source components can be used to execute software supply chain attacks
Keep reading to find out how SCA can help and how to choose the right tool.
What Is Software Composition Analysis (SCA)?
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) is the automated, continuous identification and review of open source and third-party libraries in a codebase. SCA scans and analyzes open source components for known vulnerabilities and license compliance issues to ensure the integrity and security of code and to protect the software supply chain.
In the simplest terms, SCA scans your codebase to automatically identify the following:
- Open source inventory: What open source dependencies, including direct and indirect, are in your application?
- Licensing compliance: Do you have any restrictive open source licenses that prevent derivative proprietary works?
- Security vulnerabilities: Are there any known weaknesses in these components that could be exploited?
By understanding these aspects of code, developers can build more secure and reliable software.
Until the early 2000s, teams relied on manual processes for managing open source components. This was time-consuming and error prone, especially for complex projects with many dependencies.
The introduction of SCA tools has helped developers and security teams identify and address vulnerabilities earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), which reduces the cost and effort required for remediation downstream.
How Do SCA Tools Work?
Step 1: Component Identification
SCA tools start by scanning the software project’s dependencies to create an inventory of all components used. This includes libraries, frameworks, modules, and other third-party code integrated into the project.
There are two primary methods used (and many tools take a hybrid approach):
- Manifest Scanning: SCA tools can parse your project’s manifest files, like package.json or pom.xml, which typically list the dependencies explicitly declared during development. This provides a clear picture of the intended components.
- Binary Scanning: For compiled applications or container images, manifest files might not be readily available. Here, SCA tools leverage a technique called binary fingerprinting. Essentially, they create a unique signature based on the code’s characteristics, which can then be compared against databases of known open source components.
Modern SCA tools integrate with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, enabling automated scanning (and remediation) as part of the DevSecOps workflow.
Step 2: License Compliance
Once third-party components have been identified, SCA tools assess their open source licenses to ensure they are compliant. Metadata is analyzed to ensure that the project adheres to relevant open source licenses and meets legal obligations. This helps organizations avoid licensing conflicts, infringement issues, and legal liabilities associated with non-compliance.
Step 3: Vulnerability Detection
SCA tools are most known for their ability to identify known open source vulnerabilities. They do this by cross-referencing identified components against vulnerability databases like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) or the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. Once vulnerable components are identified, SCA delivers insights into the severity of each vulnerability though tools like CVSS score or risk scoring.
Step 4: Prioritization and Remediation
Finally, SCA tools analyze any identified vulnerabilities to prioritize findings and make recommendations for remediation. This includes both reachability analysis and exploitability. Reachability analysis determines whether an application’s execution path reaches the vulnerability in a way that could be exploited at run time. Exploitability identifies the likelihood or ease with which an attacker could exploit a vulnerability.
Most SCA tools provide remediation advice that identifies the fix for a vulnerability. They also integrate with issue tracking systems and version control platforms to streamline remediation workflows. Through advanced prioritization and remediation, cybersecurity teams can be sure that they are addressing the riskiest vulnerabilities first, while safely deprioritizing unreachable vulnerabilities.
SCA and Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs)
A software bill of materials is a formal record containing the details and supply chain relationships of the various components used in building a software application, including all open source and third-party dependencies. Think of it as a list of ingredients in your software.
This “list” offers much-needed transparency, and helps organizations properly assess and identify supply chain risk, which is precisely why they’ve become industry standard for software suppliers to produce and share with companies they’re selling to.
SCA plays a crucial role in creating SBOMs by providing the necessary data and insights required to accurately document the software components used within an application. SBOMs, in turn, help companies improve software security and compliance, just two of the benefits of SCA.
Learn more about the minimum requirements for SBOMs.
Why Is Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Important?
SCA helps organizations identify publicly disclosed vulnerabilities before they become critical breaches and improves developer experience. This translates to better products, a more secure supply chain, and happier customers. Let’s explore these benefits in more detail.
Enhanced Security Posture
SCA empowers organizations to systematically identify and address vulnerabilities in their software supply chains. By proactively managing third-party and open source dependencies, organizations can prevent costly security breaches and safeguard sensitive data.
Regulatory Compliance
SCA plays a pivotal role in ensuring compliance regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS by enabling organizations to track and manage the use of third-party components, verify licensing obligations, and demonstrate due diligence in safeguarding data.
SBOMs are crucial here. They enable organizations to accurately track and trace the origins of the software components they use in different products and applications, and facilitate transparency and accountability throughout the software supply chain.
Assured Quality and Reliability
Customers entrust organizations with their sensitive data and rely on software products to deliver seamless experiences. SCA plays a pivotal role in upholding this trust by ensuring the quality and reliability of software applications.
Streamlined Development Processes
Developers are constantly trying to balance speed, innovation, and security. By automating the identification and management of third-party dependencies, and integrating with their workflows, SCA helps free up developer time, increase developer productivity, and accelerate time-to-market.
Empowerment Through Insights
SCA provides security and business leaders with the insights they need to make informed decisions about dependency selection, version management, and vulnerability remediation. By leveraging these insights, developers can take ownership of software security, mitigate technical debt, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
How to Choose a Software Composition Analysis Tool
Choosing the right SCA tool is a critical decision for any organization aiming to secure its software supply chain and maintain compliance. We recommend evaluating potential vendors using a structured, step-by-step approach. For example:
- Define Your Requirements
Start by mapping out your specific needs, including the types of open-source components you use, the size of your codebase, and your regulatory compliance obligations. This will help narrow down your options to vendors that cater to your specific industry and project scale.
- Research and Shortlist Vendors
Once your requirements are clear, research vendors who offer SCA tools that align with your needs. Look for those who have a strong reputation in the industry, as evidenced by independent reviews, customer testimonials, and third-party evaluations from analysts like Gartner.
- Evaluate Feature Sets
For each vendor on your shortlist, evaluate their feature offerings against your requirements. Focus on key capabilities such as comprehensive open-source identification, vulnerability management, license compliance, and integration with existing tools.
You should also consider whether you want to a tool that utilizes proprietary scanners, or open-source scanners.
- Request Demos and Trials
Reach out to vendors to request demos or trial versions of their tools. This hands-on experience will allow you to see how the tool works within your environment and assess its usability, performance, and integration capabilities.
Here’s a shortlist of potential questions to ask:
- How does your tool integrate with our existing CI/CD pipeline and IDEs?
- What types of vulnerabilities can your tool detect, and how does it prioritize them?
- Can your tool handle binary files and provide a complete Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)?
- What are the options for customizing policies and alerts in the tool?
- How do you ensure the tool stays updated with the latest vulnerabilities and license terms?
Curious how Cycode stacks up? Learn more about how our software composition analysis tools help security and development teams scan, prioritize, and remediate application code for vulnerable open source dependencies.
What Kinds of Vulnerabilities Can Be Found With Software Composition Analysis(SCA)?
As we’ve said, SCA focuses on vulnerabilities within open-source and third-party components, targeting security issues that can arise from unmaintained, misconfigured, or outdated dependencies.
Here are some specific vulnerabilities that SCA detects and why they’re important:
- Outdated Libraries: Unpatched libraries can harbor well-known vulnerabilities, exposing systems to security risks. SCA detects outdated versions by comparing them against databases like the NVD to ensure dependencies are secure.
- License Compliance Issues: SCA identifies components with restrictive licenses, preventing legal risks associated with improper use of open-source software. Detecting license issues ensures compliance and avoids potential legal challenges.
- Dependency Confusion: Some components may pull from external repositories that could be tampered with. SCA tools detect such dependencies to prevent malicious packages from infiltrating the software.
- Vulnerable Transitive Dependencies: Often, vulnerabilities lie in indirect dependencies. SCA tools analyze entire dependency trees to find transitive vulnerabilities that could compromise application security.
- Hardcoded Secrets: While not always a direct dependency issue, some open-source libraries may contain hardcoded credentials or tokens. SCA scans for such sensitive information within dependencies to reduce data leakage risks.
- Configuration Weaknesses: Insecure defaults in third-party components can expose an application to attacks if not properly configured. SCA tools identify these configuration issues, providing guidelines for securing them.
Challenges with Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
While SCA is an important component of an effective security strategy, it has some challenges teams need to overcome in order to ensure cyber and business resilience.
Limited Visibility and Context
Because many projects rely on multiple third-party libraries and frameworks, it can be challenging to maintain an up-to-date inventory of components. And, without visibility into these dependencies, it becomes difficult to accurately assess the security posture of the application.
But it’s not just visibility of dependencies that teams need. A comprehensive, contextual view of all stages of the SDLC is needed to interpret data for SCA tools accurately. That means teams must combine SCA with other inputs to get a more holistic view, from development to deployment.
Risk Prioritization
SCA tools often generate a significant number of alerts. They can be both time-consuming and overwhelming for security teams and developers to sort through. That means teams may struggle to prioritize vulnerabilities and may miss a critical alert due to the sheer volume of them.
Software Supply Chain Security
SCA identifies vulnerabilities in open source and third-party dependencies. It plays an important part in locking down software supply chains. However, for full coverage of software supply chain, SCA needs to be used alongside solutions that identify tool and server misconfigurations across the SDLC and as well as compromised credentials and secrets in code.
Shifting (Too Far) Left
While most SCA tools integrate with developer tools and workflows, many teams still lack the context needed to successfully remediate issues. This unfairly places the burden of security onto developers without giving them what they need to succeed.
That’s why it’s so important that security and development teams work together to find, rollout, and maintain SCA solutions. That way, developers can easily fix issues, without slowing down velocity.
To overcome these challenges, security professionals should choose a tool that:
- Offers clear visibility of dependencies
- Pulls in context from the wider SDLC
- Integrates seamlessly with developer tools and workflows
- Helps teams prioritize and remediate threats
- Doesn’t impact the speed or efficiency of software development
With this criteria in mind, point solutions just don’t offer teams the features and functionality they need. Instead, organizations should consider a platform approach.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Best Practices
Now that we’ve covered some of the challenges security and development professionals face when detecting SCA vulnerabilities, let’s discuss some best practice tips that’ll help ensure your software remains secure and compliant.
Shift Security Left in the SDLC
Integrating your SCA tool early in the SDLC is critical. By doing so, you can identify and address vulnerabilities and license compliance issues as code is being written, rather than after it’s already in production. This approach not only reduces the cost of remediation, but also helps maintain development speed by catching issues before they become embedded in the codebase.
Automate Policy Enforcement
To ensure consistency and reduce human error, automate the enforcement of security and compliance policies. Use your SCA tool to set up automated checks within your CI/CD pipeline, where builds can be halted if critical vulnerabilities or license violations are detected. This automation ensures that security is maintained without slowing down the development process.
Regularly Monitor and Update Components
Open-source components often become outdated or unsupported, posing security risks. Regularly monitor your components for new vulnerabilities, and promptly update them to the latest secure versions. Implement a process for continuous monitoring so that your development and security teams can stay ahead of potential risks.
Foster Cross-functional Collaboration
Remember: Security is a team sport!
Ensure that software composition analysis is integrated into security and development teams’ workflows, and that security is considered at every stage of the development process. Establish clear communication channels and shared goals to align teams on the importance of SCA and its role in maintaining software security and compliance.
How to Use Software Composition Analysis(SCA) in Development Processes
SCA is a critical part of modern application security. But developers are often hesitant to adopt security tools due to concerns that they may slow down productivity or disrupt workflows. For SCA to be effective, it’s crucial to select tools that integrate seamlessly into existing development processes, allowing teams to address vulnerabilities without sacrificing efficiency.
Here are some tips to effectively integrate SCA into developer workflows:
Integrate SCA in CI/CD Pipelines
Automate SCA scans in CI/CD to detect vulnerabilities before they reach production. This setup provides immediate feedback to developers on component security.
Conduct Regular Dependency Reviews
Schedule regular scans of your software’s dependencies. Regular monitoring keeps you informed about new vulnerabilities in open-source components that may arise post-release.
Prioritize Remediation Efforts
Use SCA reachability analysis to focus on vulnerabilities that pose actual risks, allowing developers to prioritize fixes efficiently.
Establish Security Gates
Set policies that prevent merging code with high-severity vulnerabilities into main branches. This ensures that only secure components enter your codebase.
Educate Developers
Provide training on SCA tools and best practices for managing open-source dependencies. Awareness empowers developers to select secure components and reduce the introduction of vulnerable dependencies.
The good news is, Cycode was designed by developers for developers and integrates seamlessly into development workflows with real-time feedback through pull request scans, CLI, and IDE integration.
How Can Cycode Help?
Cycode’s security-first, developer-friendly Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform provides visibility, prioritization, and remediation for security, engineering, and DevOps teams throughout the software development lifecycle. This includes our SCM-first approach to SCA in which we identify all dependencies without having to intervene in the CI/CD process. Furthermore, our SCA solution delivers code-to-cloud visibility where we trace a container image back to a specific code repository to identify how vulnerabilities move through pipelines.
Cycode offers a unified security platform that consolidates application security testing and pipeline security to deliver code-to-cloud security coverage. In addition to SCA, our application security testing includes SAST (which scans 31% faster than the competition), IaC, and container scanning. Cycode ASPM not only provides our own suite of scanning tools, we also ingest data from third-party scanners to give you a full view of your application risk.
Book a demo now to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions About Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
What is continuous monitoring in SCA?
Continuous monitoring in SCA involves ongoing scans of open-source and third-party components to detect vulnerabilities as they emerge. This proactive approach allows organizations to address new security threats in real time, maintaining a secure and compliant software environment.
What is the software bill of materials (SBOM) in SCA?
An SBOM in SCA is a comprehensive inventory of all components, libraries, and dependencies in an application. It provides transparency into the software’s structure, helping teams manage open-source risks and maintain compliance by tracking the origins and licenses of each component.
What is SCA reachability analysis?
SCA reachability analysis determines whether a vulnerability within a dependency can actually be exploited by the application. This process filters out irrelevant vulnerabilities, enabling developers to focus on fixing only those issues that pose real security risks.
What is remediation in SCA?
Remediation in SCA is the process of resolving identified vulnerabilities, often by updating to safer versions of affected components. Effective SCA tools provide remediation guidance to ensure that fixes are efficiently implemented, minimizing potential security risks.
What is vulnerability detection in SCA?
Vulnerability detection in SCA scans open-source and third-party dependencies for known security flaws. By referencing databases like the NVD, SCA identifies and prioritizes vulnerabilities, empowering teams to address critical risks promptly and maintain secure application structures.
