WhiteSource Rolls Out New Open Source Security Detector

WhiteSource on Tuesday launched its next-generation software composition analysis (SCA) technology, dubbed “Effective Usage Analysis,” with the promise that it can reduce open source vulnerability alerts by 70 percent.

The newly developed technology provides details beyond which components are present in the application. It provides actionable insights into how components are being used. It also evaluates their impact on the security of the application.

The new solution shows which vulnerabilities are effective. For instance, it can identify which vulnerabilities get calls from the proprietary code.

It also underscores the impact of open source code on the overall security of the application and shows which vulnerabilities are ineffective. Effective Usage Analysis technology allows security and engineering teams to cut through the noise to enable correct prioritization of threats to the security of their products, according to WhiteSource CEO Rami Sass.

“Prioritization is key for managing time and limited resources. By showing security and engineering teams which vulnerable functionalities are the most critical and require their immediate attention, we are giving them the confidence to plan their operations and optimize remediation,” he said.

The company’s goal is to empower businesses to develop better software by harnessing the power of open source. In its Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Wave report in 2017, Forrester recognized the company as the best current offering.

WhiteSource’s new Effective Usage Analysis offering addresses an ongoing challenge for open source developers: to identify and correct identifiable security vulnerabilities proactively, instead of watching or fixing problems after the fact, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

“That should result in applications that are more inherently secure and also improve the efficiency of developers and teams,” he told LinuxInsider. “Effective Usage Analysis appears to be a solid individual solution that is also complementary and additive to WhiteSource’s other open source security offerings.”

Open Source Imperative

As open source usage has increased, so has the number of alerts on open source components with known vulnerabilities. Security teams have become overloaded with security alerts, according to David Habusha, vice president of product at WhiteSource.

“We wanted to help security teams to prioritize the critical vulnerabilities they need to deal with first, and increase the developers’ confidence that the open source vulnerabilities they are being asked to fix are the most pressing issues that are exposing their applications to threats,” he told LinuxInsider.

The current technology in the market is limited to detecting which vulnerable open source components are in your application, he said. They cannot provide any details on how those components are being used, or the impact of each vulnerable functionality to the security of the application.

The new technology currently supports Java and JavaScript. The company plans to expand its capabilities to include additional programming languages. Effective Usage Analysis is currently in beta testing and will be fully available in June.

How It Works

Effective Usage Analysis promises to cut down open source vulnerabilities alerts dramatically by showing which vulnerabilities are effective (getting calls from the proprietary code that impact the security of the application) and which ones are ineffective.

Only 30 percent of reported alerts on open source components with known vulnerabilities originated from effective vulnerabilities and required high prioritization for remediation, found a WhiteSource internal research study on Java applications.

Effective Usage Analysis also will provide actionable insights to developers for remediating a vulnerability by providing a full trace analysis to pinpoint the path to the vulnerability. It adds an innovative level of resolution for understanding which functionalities are effective.

This approach aims to reduce open source vulnerability alerts and provide actionable insights. It identifies the vulnerabilities’ exact locations in the code to enable faster, more efficient remediation.

A Better Mousetrap

Effective Usage Analysis is an innovative technology representing a radical new approach to effectiveness analysis that may be applied to a variety of use cases, said WhiteSource’s Habusha. SCA tools traditionally identify security vulnerabilities associated with an open source component by matching its calculated digital signature with an entry stored in a specialized database maintained by the SCA vendor.

SCA tools retrieve data for that entry based on reported vulnerabilities in repositories such as the NVD, the U.S. government repository of standards-based vulnerabilities.

“While the traditional approach can identify open source components for which security vulnerabilities are reported, it does not establish if the customer’s proprietary code actually references — explicitly or implicitly — entities reported as vulnerable in such components,” said Habusha.

WhiteSource’s new product is an added component that targets both security professionals and developers. It helps application security professionals prioritize their security alerts and quickly detect the critical problems that demand their immediate attention.

It helps developers by mapping the path from their proprietary code to the vulnerable open source functionality, providing insights into how they are using the vulnerable functionality and how the issues can be fixed.

Different Bait

Effective Usage Analysis employs a new scanning process that includes the following steps:

• Scanning customer code;
• Analyzing how the code interacts with open source components;
• Indicating if reported vulnerabilities are effectively referenced by such code; and
• Identifying where that happens.

It employs a combination of advanced algorithms, a comprehensive knowledge base, and a fresh new user interface to accomplish those tasks. Effective Usage Analysis enables customers to establish whether reported vulnerabilities constitute a real risk.

“That allows for a significant potential reduction in development efforts and higher development process efficiency,” said Habusha.

Potential Silver Bullet

WhiteSource’s new solution has the potential to be a better detection tool for open source vulnerabilities, suggested Avi Chesla, CTO of Empow Cyber Security. The new detection tools will allow developers to understand the potential risk associated with the vulnerabilities.

The tools “will ultimately motivate developers to fix them before releasing a new version. Or at least release a version with known risks that will allow the users to effectively manage the risks through external security tools and controls,” he told LinuxInsider.

The new approach matters, because the long-standing existing vulnerabilities are and should be known to the industry, Chesla explained. It offers a better chance that security tools will detect exploitation attempts against them.

Effective Usage Analysis is probably the most important factor because developers are flooded with alerts, or noise. The work of analyzing the noise-to-signal ratio is time-consuming and requires cybersecurity expertise, noted Chesla.

The “true” signals are the alerts that represent a vulnerability that actually can be exploited and lead to a real security breach. The cybersecurity market deals with this issue on a daily basis.

“Security analysts are flooded with logs and alerts coming from security tools and experience a similar challenge to identify which alerts represent a real attack intent in time,” Chesla pointed out.

Equifax Factor

The major vulnerability that compromised Equifax last year sent security experts and software devs scrambling for effective fixes. However, it is often a business decision, rather than a security solution, that most influences software decisions, suggested Ed Price, director of compliance and senior solution architect at Devbridge Group.

“Any tools that make it easier for the engineering team to react and make the code more secure are a value-add,” he told LinuxInsider.

In some cases, the upgrade of a single library, which then cascades down the dependency tree, will create a monumental task that cannot be fixed in a single sprint or a reasonable timeframe, Price added.

“In many cases, the decision is taken out of the hands of the engineering team and business takes on the risk of deploying code without the fixes and living with the risk,” Price said, adding that no tool — open source or otherwise — will change this business decision.

“Typically, this behavior will only change in an organization once an ‘Equifax event’ occurs and there is a penalty in some form to the business,” he noted.

Saving Code Writers’ Faces

WhiteSource’s new tool is another market entry that aims to make sense of the interconnected technologies used in enterprise environments, suggested Chris Roberts, chief security architect at Acalvio.

“The simple fact of the matter is, we willingly use code that others have written, cobbling things together in an ever increasingly complex puzzle of collaborative code bases,” he told LinuxInsider, “and then we wonder why the researchers and criminals can find avenues in. It is good to see someone working hard to address these issues.”

The technologies will help if people both pay attention and learn from the mistakes being made. It is an if/and situation, Roberts said.

The logic is as follows: *If* I find a new tool that helps me understand the millions of lines of code that I have to manage or build as part of a project, *and* the understanding that the number of errors per 100 lines is still unacceptable, then a technology that unravels those complexities, dependencies and libraries is going to help, he explained.

“We need to use it as a learning tool and not another crutch or Band-Aid to further mask the garbage we are selling to people,” Roberts said.

Necessary Path

Hackers love open source software security vulnerabilities because they are a road map for exploiting unpatched systems, observed Tae-Jin Kang, CEO of Insignary. Given that the number of vulnerabilities hit a record in 2017, according to the CVE database, finding the vulnerabilities is the best, first line of defense.

“Once they are found in the code and patched, then it is appropriate to begin leveraging technologies to deal with higher-order, zero-day issues,” Kang told LinuxInsider.

Organizations for years have looked to push back the day of reckoning with regard to OSS security vulnerabilities. They have been viewed as trivial, while engineering debt has piled up.

“Equifax has been the clearest illustration of what happens when these two trends meet,” said Kang. “With the implementation of GDPR rules, businesses need to get more aggressive about uncovering and patching security vulnerabilities, because the European Union’s penalties have teeth.”