Cloud Security for Third-Party and Open-Source Libraries

Why should organizations pivot to cloud security for homegrown and commercially available applications?  

Organizations are embracing the public cloud at a tremendous pace as the cloud platform empowers the constrained DevOps and Security teams to deliver services faster to their organizations, raising overall efficiency. Amid this transformation, cloud security is a critical concern in cloud adoption.  

For organizations to avail benefits of the cloud, developers and security teams need to protect the cloud infrastructure from cyber risks, which can originate from building applications or procuring commercially available software that uses third-party or open-source software libraries. Open-source software use is not going away. Enterprises need more effective management to eliminate or minimize the business risk that will require gaining visibility of the complete software inventory. 

 

Why is the security assessment of software components, including third-party and open source  libraries, so critical?  

When an organization uses an open-source library or a third-party software package, they trust that the vendor or author of the package has the same cybersecurity maturity as their organization. Unfortunately, this is often not the case.  Malicious attackers could take advantage of these differences in cyber maturity to bypass the advanced security practices of enterprises. They try to abuse the trust in these packages to gain a foothold in the secured enterprise environment.  

3 Best Practices for Securing the supply chain 

Gain complete visibility into your supply chain.  

Make sure that you know all the software libraries and packages that are in use in your tech stack and where they originate. When your security teams find a vulnerability, it is crucial to be able to quickly see all the places in your environment using the package or library. We recommend using a tool that can provide a holistic view of all packages in your environment and alert you if there are new additional packages. 

Identify and respond to vulnerabilities quickly 

Most attacks leverage well-known or existing vulnerabilities. Once a cloud security platform identifies the issues, you can apply the proper patches and fixes to address them. Staying ahead of these attacks by quickly spotting and fixing these vulnerabilities is the best way to prevent supply chain attacks.  

Continuously monitor your supply chain 

The safety of a library or package does not guarantee its future security. Hence, we discover new vulnerabilities in existing software all the time. Using an automated tool to frequently check your libraries and software components is critical to identifying any emerging threats. The use of open-source software and third-party libraries is not going away. However, it needs more effective management to eliminate or minimize the business risk that comes with third-party software packages and libraries. 

How can we help? 

Our new solution, Xcloud, detects cloud security vulnerabilities in third-party libraries that can compromise application security in an intuitive dashboard. It uncovers all vulnerabilities in critical application libraries and scans container and cloud workloads for software dependencies throughout their application software supply chain. It provides recommendations for remediation either through updated security patches or policy enforcement.  

Xcloud continuously scans commercially available and homegrown software applications for inherent dependencies that need prioritization of risks to build a remediation plan. The security teams can then plan a full review of software inventory and create a remediation plan to address any risks that come from disclosures like Log4Shell.  

How do we do it? 

Xcloud first searches the entire filesystem looking for any packages and libraries in your open source or commercial software applications. Once Xcloud maps the inventory of third-party libraries, it helps the developers and security admins gain visibility on the most critical risks with prioritization needing remediation.  

It scans all libraries such as WAR, EAR, JAR, and JS files for vulnerability packages and then reports on the dashboard. The security admin logs onto the dashboard where they can connect their cloud applications. The Xcloud dashboard enables security admins to gain complete visibility on undetected CVEs. Security teams then can set up a remediation plan based on risk assessment and run software patches as necessary for third-party libraries.