DevOps May Be Cause of and Solution to Open Source Component Chaos

RSA CONFERENCE 2018 – San Francisco – Modern software development is trending more toward a componentized approach because developers would rather assemble something using a variety of well-built pieces of third-party code than reinvent the wheel every time they create something new. The approach has done wonders for speed and agility, but it's increasing a lot of enterprise attack surfaces because too few organizations are keeping up with the vulnerabilities these components pose.

A new study outlined today at the DevOps Connect event at RSA Conference in San Francisco shows that the threat, or at least the awareness of the threat, is on the rise. A survey conducted by Sonatype among over 2,000 IT pros — with a heavy emphasis on developers — showed that 31% of participants suspect or have verified a breach related to open source components in the last 12 months. That's more than double the ratio of those answering similarly in 2014.

In some ways, it's inevitable that components are drawing more scrutiny than four years ago. High-profile open source vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed and Struts-Shock are forcing this issue into the security consciousness of more organizations. And big breaches caused by components, such as the one at Equifax, emphasize the consequences of ignoring these vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, that scrutiny isn't necessarily translating into swift, meaningful action to address the problem. The Sonatype study showed that 62% of organizations today still do not have meaningful controls over what components are in their applications. This number may even be on the optimistic side. A different study out last week from Veracode showed that only 23% of organizations test for vulnerabilities in components at every release and just 52% update those components when a security vulnerability in one of them is announced.

That's startling considering that the Veracode study found that 93% of organizations today utilize open source or third-party components, with an average of 73 components used in these applications. It's clear that this is no niche in development processes — it's simply how applications are built today. And given trends in DevOps, the trend is expected to accelerate.

"DevOps, in a way, has many parallels to high-velocity manufacturing, and as a part of that we're using open source components to be more efficient in that manufacturing," explains Derek Weeks, vice president and DevOps advocate for Sonatype, who went over study findings today.

While that's going to increase the number of components dev teams will use to build their applications, it also introduces a more reliable avenue for imposing some semblance of governance and control over those components.

"What they're doing is introducing tools to manage this massive number of components and parts in the 'manufacturing' process, whether they're containers moving around, bits of source code moving around, bits of open source components moving around, and build artifacts moving around," Weeks says. "They want to be able to release fast and fail fast. If you don't track those parts, it's very hard to release fast and then pull it back if you can't trace it."

Security teams should be able to piggyback onto this level of automation that's mostly been imposed for quality reasons to also control security vulnerabilities within source code. At mature DevSecOps teams, that's already happening, according to the Sonatype study. 

The research showed that among traditional waterfall development shops that do not adhere to DevOps methodologies, just 58% report having open source governance policies in place. What's worse, 48% of those non-DevOps shops with a policy say they ignore those policies. So just a sliver of traditional organizations have rules around how components are used and stick to them. Meanwhile, among mature DevOps shops, 77% report having open source governance policies in place. And just 24% of those organizations ignore the policies.

"When you're embedding open source governance throughout the development life cycle, automation becomes very difficult to ignore," Weeks explains. "It's embedded into the design tools and build tools that you're using, and when it's hitting you in the face as a developer, it's hard to sidestep."

Join Dark Reading LIVE for two cybersecurity summits at Interop ITX. Learn from the industry's most knowledgeable IT security experts. Check out the Interop ITX 2018 agenda here.

Related Content: