Software Composition Analysis

Open source code makes up >80% of applications, so it’s essential that development teams know exactly which:

• Open source packages are viable for inclusion in your application’s codebase
• Open source licenses are approved for use, or else may be at odds with the overall license of your codebase
• Open source dependencies are affected by security vulnerabilities 

The ActiveState Platform is a universal package management solution for Python, Perl and Tcl programming languages that provides organizations with the capabilities of software composition analysis (SCA) tools, including:

• A software Bill Of Materials (BOM) – a list of all packages and dependencies
• A Security Profile – a list of all known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)
• License Compliance – a list of all known open source licenses in your codebase

By implementing the ActiveState Platform, organizations can centrally establish and maintain open source supply chain security across their extended enterprise, and empower security teams & DevSecOps to improve application security (appsec).

Software Bill of Materials

A BOM identifies all the open source packages and dependencies associated with your application, since you can’t manage what you don’t know you have. The BOM is key to identifying at a glance outliers, issues and errors that require further investigation on a per project basis.

The ActiveState Platform provides organizations with the capabilities of an open source compliance scanner. It delivers a comprehensive list of ingredients required to build your application, including:

• The version of the programming language for the project (Python, Perl and Tcl)
• Open source packages from the language’s ecosystem, as well as their dependencies
• Transitive dependencies (ie., dependencies of dependencies)
• Shared libraries (ie., OpenSSL, which is shared across all the platforms you support)
• Operating system (OS)-level dependencies
• Configurations (ie., metadata like version number, open source license, etc)
• A Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) report, showing vulnerabilities for each component

A typical BOM might look like the following:

The BOM not only identifies all packages and dependencies, but also which ones have CVEs, as well as links to the National Vulnerability Database that explain each in detail.

Comply with Security Policies

With the escalating number of open source vulnerabilities reported over the past few years, keeping up with open source vulnerabilities has never been more difficult, or more important as cyber-attacks also continue to rise. But the Mean Time To Remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities is often measured in weeks, if not months. 

The ActiveState Platform not only builds all dependencies from source code for Windows, Linux and Mac, ensuring developers start with a secure development environment, but also provides organizations with the capabilities of an open source compliance scanner to help maintain security over time. The ActiveState Platform can help you reduce MTTR by providing:

• Status updates when your Python, Perl or Tcl environment is vulnerable, similar to GitHub
• A PDF report showing the severity level and details for each vulnerability
• The ability to fix and automatically rebuild your environment with secure open source components in minutes, speeding remediation

Because the ActiveState Platform tracks multiple versions of all your components, you can remediate vulnerabilities at the OS, package and dependency level by simply selecting a non-vulnerable version. The ActiveState Platform can save considerable time and effort by automatically rebuilding your environment, ready to be pulled into your CI/CD pipeline for testing. 

See how it’s done in this 2-minute video.

A list of known vulnerabilities can also be generated using the ActiveState Platform’s command line interface (CLI), the State Tool.

Comply with Licensing Policies

Legal teams implement open source licensing policies to ensure against IP infringement and lawsuits. But identifying the licenses associated with every open source in component in your application can be difficult, since:

• Without a complete open source software bill of materials, you may miss some open source component and their licenses
• Components may have no stated license, increasing the risk of utilizing them
• Components may contain sub-components that have conflicting licenses, making it difficult to understand whether the overall license complies with your policy

The ActiveState Platform can help you mitigate license risk by providing a complete bill of materials, and the licenses associated with them. You can use the ActiveState Platform’s API to programmatically retrieve and identify the licenses associated with every open source component in a project’s codebase, allowing you to automate open source license compliance. 

For example, running a license API query on our ActivePython project returns:

Ready to see for yourself? You can try the ActiveState Platform by signing up for a free account using your email or GitHub credentials. Or sign up for a free demo and let us show you how you can implement secure dependency scanning in your organization.

Frequently Asked Questions