📘 Learn what software supply chain is and how to improve security with GitHub security features.
TL;DR:
One of the most critical aspects of modern software delivery is security. In the era of open-source projects, it is challenging and not easy to control every vulnerability and make sure that our solution does not use a package with serious vulnerabilities. Today's threat to supply chain security is unpatched software. In this article, we will learn how to improve code security with GitHub security features.
Security Role in the Software Supply Chain
Application implementation nowadays looks slightly different than a few years ago. Open-source software has become a standard. Using open-source libraries in different kinds of projects is something normal nowadays, and we do not have to write every part of our application from scratch.
When using some open-source code or a library, it is worth not forgetting about security aspects. Industry data suggests that 99 percent of codebases contain open-source code. This is a lot! With this fact, we have to remember about dangers related to vulnerabilities and bugs that can lead to bad consequences. Many examples can be provided where an open-source library was used, but then serious vulnerability was discovered, and in the end, there were problems with keeping security at the right level.
Before we discuss the role of security in the software supply chain, we have to find out what it is. Software supply chain is anything that goes into or affects the source code from development through Continuous Integration and Delivery pipelines until it gets deployed into production and used broadly. Any examples? The software supply chain includes information about who wrote a specific fragment of code, which tools were used to apply security scanning, what is the infrastructure used to host our solution, or what dependencies are used.
When a solution is being developed, often security part is missed or left as the last step in the whole process of the software supply chain. One of the biggest threats to supply chain security nowadays is unpatched software. This is why we should not include security assessment as the last step of our software supply chain. Security should be an ongoing part of software development to make sure that any potential vulnerabilities can be quickly mitigated.
Keeping an eye on every security aspect can be challenging, especially for developers who are focused on the code implementation rather than scanning and searching for vulnerabilities. Also, it is important to provide security feedback to developers right away so that any potential vulnerabilities are eliminated as quickly as possible.
In the following, we will focus on the security features available on GitHub to make sure that our software supply chain is more secure.
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