Understanding Supply Chain Vulnerabilities and How to Protect Them with Snyk

What is a supply chain?

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Your Supply Chain means the processes or protocols your software has to go through from developing the code to reaching your user’s hands. Think of you as the owner of the product, supplying the product to your user.

This includes the creation of your software, the management, and the method of delivery.

The main goal of the Supply Chain Processes is to ensure that your software is of the highest quality and reliability by the time it reaches the hands of your users.

Your Supply Chain Includes:

• Code

• Open source dependencies and libraries (third-party components – software bill of materials (sbom))

• The DevOps tools and infrastructure that make up the CI/CD process Developers and DevOps teams

These processes can expose your software to security vulnerabilities as you are not in absolute control of the circumstances surrounding this packaging.

When securing your supply chain you have to think of the various stages vulnerabilities can come in as each stage requires a unique set of tools to Secure it.

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities

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The Supply Chain is vulnerable to attacks because it is complex and involves quite several moving parts. This complexity only increases as each day passes because of the new software tools being created.

There have been popular attacks on the Supply Chain in the past two years including:

SolarWinds: Where customers on the Orion platform downloaded updates that were injected with malicious code that granted hackers access to private information. This breach was not noticed till after six months.

CodeCov: Where an attacker obtained credentials used in Codecov’s Docker image creation process because of an error in the build process. This allowed them to steal credentials and additional resources in unsuspecting customer’s continuous integration (CI) environments. This breach was not noticed for about 3 months.

Other popular Supply Chain Security breaches occurred with Kaseya and Apache Log4j.

Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM)

Software bill of materials (or BoM) is a list of components used in your software. It includes both direct and indirect components, versions, and software dependencies and can be used to identify any potential security risks in the software before it is released. Those components and dependencies can include open-source software projects, proprietary code, APIs, programming language frameworks, and software libraries.

SBOM is an inventory of all third-party software being used, having this inventory is the first step in securing your supply chain. If you are aware of the composition of your application, it would be easier to figure out how to secure these parts.

Examples of software bill of materials include the software components and versions used in your product, as well as any third-party libraries or services used. It also includes details such as the environment in which the software was built and tested, and any additional components or services used.

Securing your Supply Chain With Snyk

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Snyk is an open-source product that helps you secure your entire software development life cycle. Snyk also helps you create secure and reliable software supply chains, so your customers have the best protection against malicious attacks.

Synk does this in 4 ways :

Snyk Code: Used to find and fix vulnerabilities in application source code. It scans source code for any type of vulnerability and provides actionable insights that can be used to secure the supply chain and protect customer data.

Snyk Open-Source: Used to find and fix vulnerabilities in 3rd party libraries or dependencies your application relies on

Snyk Container: Used to find and fix vulnerabilities in container images or Kubernetes workloads used in your cluster

Snyk Infrastructure as Code: Used to find and fix misconfigurations in Kubernetes manifests, terraform, cloud formation, and azure.

Conclusion

Software supply chain security is extremely important for companies and customers alike. Security breaches can have devastating consequences and can put customer data at risk.

By using tools like Snyk, your company can create secure supply chains and protect your customers' data from malicious actors.