5 Ways to Manage Your Open Source Components Efficiently and Securely

Open source components form the bedrock of many modern applications built by developers. In the context of development within the enterprise, these open source components are particularly helpful for development teams who operate in fast-paced

A component could be a code snippet, library, framework, or a separately running process. The big advantage is that these blocks of freely reusable and modifiable code speed up development time versus building an app completely from scratch. According to

Read on to find out about the importance of security when using open source components. You’ll also get five tips on securely and effectively managing these components.

Open Source Security Risks

The increased use of open source components has the potential to introduce new security risks into applications. It’s not that the open source model leads to poorly built components with several security flaws — large open source projects are well-supported and often as secure as equivalent proprietary projects.

Problems arise, however, when enterprises don’t implement policies to properly manage the use of their open source components. Inadequate supply chain management leads to an environment wherein developers end up using outdated components with known security flaws in the apps they build. And cybercriminals are more than willing to exploit apps with those vulnerabilities.

Having just one vulnerable component in a codebase puts the entire application at risk. Delayed development cycles, the high cost of fixing vulnerable software, and compliance problems are some of the main business risks you can encounter.

The enormous data breach that occurred at consumer credit reporting agency Equifax serves as an ample warning to any business of what can happen when you don’t manage open source components properly. The company expects the cost of the breach to reach $439 million by the end of 2018, making it the most costly in corporate history.

This resource goes into further detail on open source security.

How to Securely Manage Open source Components

Create an Open source Policy

An open source policy is important because it directly states your open source strategy and empowers developers to incorporate open source components while understanding the underlying risks.

An open source policy reduces inefficiencies across different teams by encouraging them to share information on open source components, such as technical issues. An open source management policy also minimizes compliance issues by providing visibility over any components that are subject to specific licensing requirements.

It’s critical to ensure compliance before product shipment, and implementing a policy can achieve the type of end-to-end management you need identify all open source components, review their licenses, and inform employees on the legal risks involved.

Keep an Inventory

Keeping an inventory of open source components should be high on your list of priorities. Problems arise when open source component use is not properly tracked, and developers can easily introduce vulnerabilities into applications; vulnerabilities that you won’t be aware of without an inventory.

Manually keeping an inventory is quite time-consuming, so you can consider software composition analysis tools that automate it.

Never Copy and Paste Code Snippets

Part of your open source policy should be to emphasize that it is never acceptable to copy and paste code snippets from open source libraries and other components. Copy and pasting leads to a loss of visibility and no way to track potentially flawed code.

Focus on Quality

Quality needs to be the priority when evaluating any open source component. The definition of quality differs from the perspective of different companies and individuals, however, you can use common indicators such as the number of bugs fixed in each version, the number of commits, and the severity of bugs to evaluate open source projects for quality.

The overarching point is not to rely on familiarity alone. For example, the infamous Heartbleed bug affected OpenSSL, a popular software library for the secure communication of information over the Internet. Many of the Internet’s largest websites used OpenSSL at the time the vulnerability came to light, putting sensitive information at risk. Do your research and put quality first.

Update Swiftly

The Equifax breach happened when the company failed to update its version of the open source web application framework, Apache Struts. Equifax continued to use an outdated version of Struts which contained a vulnerability that made dependent software easy to hack. The breach occurred in May 2017, however, a patch was released two months prior that addressed the vulnerability.

This story serves as a wake-up call to enterprises using open source components. It’s imperative to have a process that updates those components swiftly upon the release of new patches/versions.

Software inventory management tools can track and automatically notify you of available updates.

Wrap Up

There are security risks when using open source components, however, by closely monitoring the use of these components at your enterprise and following some of the best practices outlined here, you can effectively nullify most risks.