Search for: All records

Reusable software libraries, frameworks, and components, such as those provided by open source ecosystems and third-party suppliers, accelerate digital innovation. However, recent years have shown almost exponential growth in attackers leveraging these software artifacts to launch software supply chain attacks. Past well-known software supply chain attacks include the SolarWinds, log4j, and xz utils incidents. Supply chain attacks are considered to have three major attack vectors: through vulnerabilities and malware accidentally or intentionally injected into open source and third-partydependencies/components/containers; by infiltrating thebuild infrastructureduring the build and deployment processes; and through targeted techniques aimed at thehumansinvolved in software development, such as through social engineering. Plummeting trust in the software supply chain could decelerate digital innovation if the software industry reduces its use of open source and third-party artifacts to reduce risks. This article contains perspectives and knowledge obtained from intentional outreach with practitioners to understand their practical challenges and from extensive research efforts. We then provide an overview of current research efforts to secure the software supply chain. Finally, we propose a future research agenda to close software supply chain attack vectors and support the software industry. 

Despite being beneficial in automated provisioning of computing infrastructure at scale, infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts are susceptible to containing secrets, such as hard-coded passwords. A derivation of practices related to secret management for IaC can help practitioners to secure their secrets, potentially aiding them to securely develop IaC scripts. The goal of the paper is to help practitioners in secure development of infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts by identifying practices for secret management in IaC. We conduct a grey literature review with 38 Internet artifacts to identify 12 practices. We identify practices that are applicable for all IaC languages, e.g., prioritized encryption, as well as language-specific practices, such as state separation for Terraform. Our findings can be beneficial for (i) practitioners who can apply the identified practices to secure secrets in IaC development, and (ii) researchers who can investigate how the secret management process can be improved to facilitate secure development of IaC scripts.