APPSEC
Best Practices for SCA Scanning in Agile Development
November 14, 2024
As modern development methodologies increasingly adopt agile practices, security has to keep up. Agile development emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and quick iteration, which leaves little room for security measures that could potentially slow down the process. This is where Software Composition Analysis (SCA) plays a pivotal role in ensuring that the software supply chain is secure without sacrificing development velocity.
In this blog, we will explore best practices for implementing SCA in agile environments, particularly focusing on how to achieve seamless integration into development workflows, prioritize and triage vulnerabilities by leveraging a pipelineless approach to maintain the agility and speed your teams need without compromising on security.
Security often becomes a bottleneck in fast-paced development environments when integrated too late in the software development life cycle (SDLC). To avoid this, it's critical to incorporate SCA early - at the code writing and commit stages. This proactive approach not only reduces risks before they accumulate but also ensures vulnerabilities are addressed before they “leak” into main or production branches. The earlier security vulnerabilities are discovered, the cheaper and easier they are to fix.
In traditional security models, vulnerabilities often aren’t uncovered until the testing phase or even after build or deployment, resulting in costly and time-consuming remediation efforts. By integrating SCA scanning into every code push, security becomes a natural part of the process, making it easier to detect and resolve issues early on.
Arnica offers a pipelineless approach to AppSec, allowing teams to scan code in real time and deliver immediate alerts, enabling developers to fix issues while they code. This minimizes disruptions to development velocity and ensures that teams remain productive while addressing critical security risks.
Selecting the right SCA tool is crucial for ensuring it enhances, rather than disrupts, your development workflow. The tool you choose should integrate seamlessly with the platforms and tools your developers already use, including source code management (SCM) platforms like GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, and Azure DevOps. It should also fit smoothly into collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, and connect to ticketing systems like Jira, ADO Boards, or ServiceNow.
Arnica excels by providing real-time scanning capabilities, and seamlessly weaving security checks and feedback into the developer’s everyday workflow. This is built using a pipelineless approach that guarantees 100% coverage and visibility, always. With direct integrations into your source code management system as well as your chat and ticketing tools, developers are empowered to move quickly without leaving their environment or learning a new tool. This keeps productivity high while ensuring the codebase remains secure, and developers are happy.
Not all SCA findings are critical, so it’s crucial to prioritize and triage effectively. Traditional SCA scanners often rely on methods like CVSS scores and dependency management to rank vulnerabilities, but these can often be misleading because they don't provide meaningful context about the actual risk. CVSS scores are theoretical, and fail to account for factors such as exploitability, reachability, or how a vulnerability affects your specific environment. Additionally, knowing whether a certain dependency is direct or indirect (transitive) is not enough to make informed decisions. Modern SCA tools go beyond this outdated approach, offering real-time risk assessment based on factors that truly matter, allowing developers to focus on the most dangerous vulnerabilities first and avoid wasting time on less critical issues.
Reachability assesses whether a vulnerability can actually be exploited in your specific environment. Not all discovered vulnerabilities pose an immediate threat, as many may not be reachable in your code. Prioritizing based on reachability helps teams focus on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk, ensuring efforts are spent on those that are exploitable. That said, it’s important to identify which reachable vulnerable packages are fixable – not doing this can result in a ton of noise for developers.
EPSS is a data-driven model that predicts the likelihood of a vulnerability being exploited in the real world. By incorporating EPSS scores into your triage process, you can prioritize vulnerabilities based on their actual risk of being exploited, rather than theoretical severity alone. This approach enables organizations to focus their resources on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk, ensuring a more efficient and effective risk management strategy.
The Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, maintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is a curated list of vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited in the wild. These vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous because attackers are already leveraging them to breach systems. Prioritizing remediation based on the KEV ensures that your team focuses on addressing the vulnerabilities that are known to pose immediate, real-world threats. By integrating KEV data into your risk management process, you can further refine your triage efforts, ensuring that vulnerabilities with active exploits are dealt with before they can be used to compromise your application.
Many vulnerabilities exist deep within a package's dependency tree, making them easy to overlook. Prioritizing based on package depth ensures that hidden vulnerabilities, which could be leveraged by attackers, are properly addressed. Ignoring deep package risks can leave your application vulnerable to exploits targeting these nested dependencies. Arnica provides deep visibility into direct, and indirect (transitive) vulnerabilities for a given package, which includes the specific CVEs, EPSS, CVSS, and KEV scores.
Arnica conducts a thorough analysis of the entire dependency tree, even for packages that aren’t explicitly declared. This approach allows Arnica to present the user with all of the possible paths moving forward, including performing patch, minor, and major version upgrades, recreating the lock file, or if no fix is actually available. Furthermore, Arnica provides visibility into any new vulnerabilities that might be introduced with each proposed version. This proactive approach keeps teams one step ahead, allowing them to make informed decisions about managing vulnerabilities before they can impact the application.
By leveraging reachability, EPSS, KEV, package depth, and comprehensive dependency analysis, organizations can prioritize SCA risks with greater precision. These factors provide deep context about the potential impact of SCA risks, allowing teams to focus their remediation efforts on the most critical threats first. This targeted approach ensures that security risks are managed effectively, reducing the chances of vulnerable code leaking into main or production environments.
A common challenge with traditional SCA solutions is that they rely heavily on IDE plugins, CI/CD pipeline integrations, and status checks, leading to a lack of visibility into code repositories and causing delays in the ability to receive feedback, as code is typically scanned during pull requests, build, and deploy processes. This slows down the development lifecycle and significantly impacts development velocity.
Arnica’s pipelineless approach ensures that vulnerabilities are detected as soon as code is pushed, before it even reaches the pull request stage. This allows developers to be alerted early and address issues without waiting for pipeline execution, maintaining speed and efficiency throughout the development process.
While basic SCA techniques address many security risks, advanced techniques provide additional protection and ensure that your SCA strategy remains effective as your applications grow in complexity.
Contextual analysis in SCA delivers more precise insights by evaluating factors like reachability and exploitability of detected risks within your code. Not all code risks are immediately exploitable, but combining reachability analysis with metrics like EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) and KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) allows teams to focus on risks that are both reachable and likely to be exploited. Arnica’s approach ensures that only the most relevant, actionable risks are prioritized, enabling security teams to tackle genuine threats more effectively.
Arnica enhances the developer experience by offering flexible remediation paths, allowing developers to choose from patching, upgrading, or rebuilding the dependency tree. Additionally, Arnica thinks one step ahead by identifying any new vulnerabilities that could be introduced with each version upgrade. This foresight is communicated privately via ChatOps, creating a developer-friendly environment that fosters informed decision-making with minimal disruption to the development process.
Arnica’s integration with ChatOps tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams streamlines the communication of security findings in a blameless, shameless way. By delivering targeted, private notifications, Arnica ensures that the right fix reaches the right person at the right time. Additionally, Arnica directly integrates with ticketing platforms such as Jira and Azure DevOps Boards, enabling automated ticket management and reducing manual tasks. This allows security and development teams to stay aligned on priorities and quickly address issues without interrupting the development flow. This seamless integration fosters a collaborative approach to security, empowering developers to take action without friction or delays.
Different programming languages come with different security concerns. Understanding the nuances of SCA for each language your team uses is critical for maintaining security across your codebase. Below are SCA best practices for some popular programming languages.
Integrating SCA scanning early in the development lifecycle ensures continuous, seamless risk detection and mitigation. By triggering scans on every code push, organizations can identify vulnerabilities in real-time, allowing for proactive risk management. This approach minimizes the risk of code security issues accumulating into a backlog or slipping into production unnoticed, while also reducing friction between AppSec and development teams. By shifting remediation left, it ensures that development velocity is maintained without compromising security.
Book time with the Arnica team to learn more about how a pipelinless approach to Software Composition Analysis can help you upgrade your approach to AppSec.
