Software Composition Analysis (SCA) is a crucial process that helps organizations identify, assess, and manage open source components within their software applications. With SCA tools, businesses can achieve several benefits, including identifying open source components, assessing security risks, ensuring compliance with licenses, and enhancing overall software quality.
SCA's significance has grown due to the widespread adoption of open source software, with estimates showing that 95% of all software contained open source components in 2022. This prevalence exposes organizations of all sizes to potential security vulnerabilities and compliance issues if they lack a robust SCA program.
By employing SCA tools, organizations gain visibility into their software's open source components and can proactively address security vulnerabilities, ensure license compliance, and enhance code quality. This approach helps reduce the risk of security breaches and related incidents, making SCA a valuable tool for improving software security and compliance. With a wide range of SCA tools available on the market, businesses can find one that aligns with their specific needs and budget to bolster their software development processes.
Companies need to be aware of open source license limitations and obligations. Tracking open source license limitations and obligations manually is arduous, so it was automated in the form of SCA. SCA later expanded to analyze code quality and security as well.
SCA tools inspect source code, package managers, binary files, manifest files, and container images, among other things. They then compile the identified open source into a bill of materials (BOM). The BOM gets compared against a variety of databases, one of which is the U.S. government’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD), to analyze overall code quality and to discover any licenses associated with the code. The databases contain information regarding common and known vulnerabilities, and by comparing the BOM against them, a security team can identify critical legal or security vulnerabilities which they can then go on to fix.
More than 90% of any code base comes from an external supplier. That means that your development team actually codes less than 10% of any app it builds. Due to the sheer amount of open source code out there, it is no longer possible for humans to track it manually. Development is also happening faster than ever and security solutions need to be able to keep up. SCA helps you to understand what components and versions of open source are being used, to identify what security vulnerabilities affect those components, and to figure out how to remediate them.
SCA offers speed, security, and reliability, which are all essential factors in application security testing.
The benefits of SCA include:
4. Automated and prioritized vulnerabilities management and remediation.
5. License risk management, which helps you to lower the risks associated with compliance and licenses.
SCA (software composition analysis) is a segment of the AST (application security testing) tool market. SCA tools automatically scan an app’s code base, as well as related containers and registries, in order to identify any open source components and their security vulnerabilities as well as their license compliance data. They then find components with known, documented vulnerabilities and advise if the components need to be updated or have patches available. In addition to just providing visibility, some SCA tools also help to remediate open source vulnerabilities. SCA tools can discover all related components, their supporting libraries, and their direct and indirect dependencies. The scanning process generates a BOM (bill of materials), which provides an inventory of all of the project’s software assets. The tracking of open source components used by your apps is critical from both a productivity standpoint and a security standpoint.
As opposed to other application security tools, SCA tools allow the secure risk management of open source software use throughout the software supply chain.
SCA (software composition analysis) testing is a kind of application security testing (AST). The purpose of AST is to identify vulnerabilities in source code and security weaknesses in order to make applications more secure. SCA is a new technology that scans applications to identify components of open source code. In addition to security, SCA also evaluates code quality and license compliance.
