Open source security tools and practices help monitor, assess, and protect against open source vulnerabilities and threats. Open source software helps accelerate the development lifecycle, providing ready-made components that you can use as-is or as a baseline instead of creating functionality from scratch.

Open source projects make their software accessible publicly, allowing community contributors to modify the code and help improve the project. While this open nature facilitates rapid development, it also exposes the code to misconfigurations occurring due to human nature and malicious exploitation by threat actors. 

Once threat actors discover an application is exposed to a certain vulnerability, many jump on that train to exploit it before a patch is released and updated by affected organizations. The Log4j and Apache Struts vulnerabilities, for example, caused serious damage to many organizations worldwide. 

Open source security helps ensure timely detection of vulnerabilities, ensuring organizations can efficiently inventory their open source components and update to the latest patch. Popular open source security tools offer automated discovery of open source dependencies in applications, identify versions of sub-components, and push alerts when detecting policy violations and risks.

Open source security risks

Here are some of the main security risks associated with open source software.

1. Publicity of Vulnerabilities 

Any known vulnerability in an open source software component becomes public knowledge. Open source organizations and other contributors publish the vulnerabilities they discover on publicly available databases like the NVD and OWASP.

Community members can sometimes receive advanced warnings for vulnerabilities before they are published, but this information is available to anyone involved in the project, including potential cybercriminals.

2. Operational Inefficiencies

Operational inefficiencies are a major risk source for open source software. For example, the organizations using an open source component may fail to keep track of the component’s updates, so they don’t fix security issues in time to prevent a breach. Keeping inventory of all open source components used is essential to maintain transparency and avoid duplication. 

A software composition analysis tool can help you enforce inventory practices by automatically updating records. Your inventory management system should track infrequently updated projects to help you determine which software poses higher risks.

3. Insufficient Security Guarantees

Open source projects do not have a legal obligation to maintain the software’s security or offer continued support. The contributors who created the software might not be security experts, and there is no guarantee they implemented proper security practices.

The open source community does not always provide guidance to secure features against known flaws. Finally, open source software often uses third-party black-box libraries that could introduce new vulnerabilities.

4. Software Licensing Issues

Open source components have different licenses, making it difficult for developers to keep track of their obligations and ensure compliance. You must ensure your organization understands the licenses of all components, track how your development teams use these components, and enforce compliance. 

5. No Warranty

Open source projects do not offer functionality, support, or security warranties. Any support a project receives comes from voluntary contributors and can cease at any time. Furthermore, the advice given by community members is unreliable because they are not obligated to provide guidance. Thus, you need to approach all open source software as a calculated risk rather than a reliable product.

Managing vulnerabilities

Here are some important steps involved in managing your open source vulnerabilities.

  1. Maintain an Open Source Inventory

The most basic aspect of open source vulnerability management is having a clear picture of all the open source components used in your software. Even small organizations typically need to automate this process. Agile software development processes already rely on automated tools, so it should be easy to adapt these processes to include inventory capabilities. 

You can use various tools to maintain visibility into your open source usage. For example, you might use an open source tool like OWASP Dependency-Check or NPM Audit or a commercial tool like WhiteSource Bolt.

Establishing and maintaining inventory is an important part of the software development lifecycle. It should occur at logical intervals, for instance, during the branch merging or pull request validation stages.

Store the inventory results centrally to keep them easily accessible to the relevant team members. The inventory should contain sufficient metadata to allow employees to easily find details such as a component’s application, source repository, and version. 

  1. Perform a Security Assessment

You should validate all the open source components identified in the inventory process to ensure they don’t contain security vulnerabilities. The fidelity level of this security analysis may differ depending on your organization’s needs. You may consider the following actions in ascending order of fidelity and cost:

  1. Identify known vulnerabilities - search public vulnerability databases to ensure your open source components don’t contain known vulnerabilities. CVE reports and other public sources regularly publish open source vulnerabilities.
  2. Leverage commercially available security intelligence - obtain vulnerability data from additional sources like commercial data vendors to supplement the public vulnerability information.  
  3. Conduct static analysis - static analysis tools can validate if an open source component contains an unknown security vulnerability. You must report any new vulnerabilities you identify to the authors of the open source project for remediation.  
  4. Conduct security reviews - perform comprehensive reviews of your open source components to ensure security. 

Most open source inventory tools also offer alerting capabilities for publicly-known vulnerabilities. Commercial tools often offer additional security data.

  1. Use Penetration Testing

A penetration test (pentest) enables organizations to identify security weaknesses and vulnerabilities in their security posture. A penetration test is typically carried out by ethical hackers, IT experts who use hacking techniques to help organizations assess their security. 

Pentesters use various tools, approaches, and methodologies to simulate cyber attacks. The penetration test is an authorized attempt to breach the organization’s network, system, application, or device. 

A penetration test helps assess the security posture of certain IT assets. It can also help test the organization’s adherence to compliance regulations. At the end of the test, the pentester provides a report that details identified vulnerabilities and recommendations to improve security.

  1. Update Your Open Source Components

An important part of security risk management is to ensure all the tools and components you use are up to date. It is critical to update open source components regularly, even if you are not aware of any specific vulnerabilities.

In many cases, the open source community or project author fixes a security vulnerability without explicitly publishing the vulnerability. Regular updates require some engineering costs, but they are worth the added security, functionality, and features of always having the latest version. 

Conclusion

In this article, I explained the basics of open source security and covered five critical risks you must address if you make use of open source components:

  1. Publicity of vulnerabilities - open source vulnerabilities are in the public domain and attackers have access to source code, meaning they can more easily exploit them.
  2. Operational inefficiencies - open source users are responsible for updating and maintaining open source components, and this can be a cumbersome process.
  3. Insufficient security guarantees - there is no guarantee that contributors to an open source project followed quality or security guidelines in their development.
  4. Software licensing issues - open source components may have restrictive licenses that can create major compliance and legal risk.
  5. No warranty - there is no guarantee an open source component will continue to be supported or developed in the future.

I hope this will be useful as you enjoy the benefits of open source software without exposing your organization to undue risk.