The bummer about lots of supply chain work is that it does not address the attacks we see in the wild like xz where malicious code was added at the source, and attested all the way through.
There are gains to be had through these approaches, like inventory, but nobody has a good approach to stopping malicious code entering the ecosystem through the front door and attackers find this much easier than tampering with artifacts after the fact.
yencabulator · 1h ago
I think a big part of the push is just being able to easily & conclusively answer "are we vulnerable or not" when a new attack is discovered. Exhaustive inventory already is huge.
tough · 12m ago
i read somewhere go has a great package for this that checks statically typed usage of the vuln specific functions not whole package deps
XiZhao · 1h ago
I run a sw supply chain company (fossa.com) -- agree that there's a lot of low hanging gains like inventory still around. There is a shocking amount of very basic but invisible surface area that leads to downstream attack vectors.
From a company's PoV -- I think you'd have to just assume all 3rd party code is popped and install some kind of control step given that assumption. I like the idea of reviewing all 3rd party code as if its your own which is now possible with some scalable code review tools.
sollewitt · 53m ago
Valuably you also get demonstrable _insecure_ status - half the pain for our org of log4js was figuring out where it was in the stacks, and at which versions. This kind of accounting is really valuable when you're trying to figure out if and where you are affected.
There are gains to be had through these approaches, like inventory, but nobody has a good approach to stopping malicious code entering the ecosystem through the front door and attackers find this much easier than tampering with artifacts after the fact.
From a company's PoV -- I think you'd have to just assume all 3rd party code is popped and install some kind of control step given that assumption. I like the idea of reviewing all 3rd party code as if its your own which is now possible with some scalable code review tools.