Software Composition Analysis (SCA) is a relatively new industry term for a set of tools that provides users visibility into their open source inventory. Despite its misleading name suggesting access to all aspects of the source code (proprietary, third party commercial and open source), software composition analysis in effect acts as a open source management tool only.

SCA tools were born out of a cross-industry rise in open source usage which made it increasingly hard for companies to track open source components manually using spreadsheets, emails and ticketing systems. As open source usage grew to encompass the majority of software creation, it became a necessity to automate the open source management process.

SCA tools come in different forms, offering a range of capabilities from those focused on licensing compliance only to others encompassing both security and license management.

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What is Software Composition Analysis?

First and foremost, SCA tools generate an inventory report of all open source components in your products, including all direct and transitive dependencies. Taking inventory of open source usage is critical as it is the basis for properly managing your open source usage. After all, how can you secure or ensure compliance of something you do not know you’re using?

Once all open source components have been identified, SCA tools provide information on each component. Basic information includes the open source license and whether there’s a security vulnerability associated with that component.

Advanced tools offer automatic policy enforcements by cross referencing every open source component found in your code with your organizational policies, triggering different responses from initiating an automated approval workflow to failing the build.

Leading tools are also able to automate the entire process of open source selection, approval and tracking, saving developers precious time and increasing their accuracy significantly. Some such tools are able to alert of vulnerabilities in a component while still on the web, before a pull is made and the component enters the system. Other tools are able to navigate developers to the precise location of a vulnerable component thereby reducing remediation efforts.

Why is SCA Becoming a Must-Have Part of Application Security Portfolios?

Open source components have become the main building block in software applications in all verticals. Yet despite the heavy reliance on open source, most companies have been generally lax about ensuring that open source components meet basic security standards and that organizations are compliant with the required open source licenses.

The need to detect open source components with known vulnerabilities has long been recognized by security organizations like OWASP . Unfortunately, only as hackers realized how lucrative open source vulnerabilities can be and as a result of hackers’ active targeting of these weaknesses, awareness among software development and security teams gradually increased.

It is important to understand that once a vulnerability is made known the community databases and issue trackers where vulnerabilities are made public serve as valuable resources for hackers to obtain details that may help them carry out an exploit.

The more popular an open source component is, the greater the value to hackers of exploiting a vulnerability found in it.

This is where SCA tools come into play. They provide essential security for software comprised in part of open source components. SCA tools identify which open source components a corporation is using in its source code, and match these components with community databases, advisories and issue trackers to bring to the surface any vulnerabilities that may exist in the source code.

SCA tools provide valuable data about a corporation’s open source inventory to executives, development, security and legal teams with the capability to generate reports for visibility.