Open Source Software as a malware “on ramp”

Open Source Software (OSS) is an efficient means to building out solutions rapidly with high quality. You utilize crowdsourced design, development and validation to conveniently speed your engineering. OSS also fosters a sense of sharing and building together - across company boundaries or in one’s free time.

So just pull a library down off the web, build your project, and your company is ready to go. Or is that the best approach? What could be in this library you’re including in your solution which might not be wanted? This code will be running in critical environments - like your SaaS servers, internal systems, or on customer systems. Convenience comes at a price and there are some well known situations of hacks embedded in popular open source libraries.

What is the best approach to getting the benefits of OSS and maintaining the integrity of your solution?

Good practices are a necessity to ensure a high level of security. Just like when you utilize OSS and then test functionality, scale, and load - you should be validating against vulnerabilities. Pre-production vulnerability and penetration testing is a good start. Also, utilize good internal process and reviews. Keep the process simple to maintain speed but establish internal accountability and vigilance on code that’s entering your environment. You are practicing good coding techniques already with reviews and/or peer coding - build an equivalency with OSS.

Always utilize known good repositories and validate the project sponsors. Perform diligence on the committers just like you would for your own employees. You likely perform some type of background check on your employees before making an offer - whether going to a third party or simply looking them up on linkedin and asking around. OSS committers have the same risk to your company - why not do the same for them? Understandably, you probably wouldn't do this for a third party purchased solution, but your contract or expectation is that the company is already doing this and abiding by minimum security standards. That may not be true for your OSS solutions, and as such your responsibility for validation is at least slightly higher. There are plenty of projects coming from reputable sources that you can rely on.

Ensure that your path to production is only coming from artifacts which have been built on internal sources which were either developed or reviewed by your team. Also, be intentional about OSS library upgrades, this should planned and part of the process.

OSS is highly leveraged in today’s software solutions and provides many benefits. Be diligent in your approach to ensure you only see the upside of open source.