Everybody’s talking about securing the DevOps pipeline and shifting security left.. AppSec tools like SAST (Static Application Security Testing), DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), and others that address issues in proprietary software have become staples of the developer’s security toolbox.

Today, we announced our entrance into the Static Application Security Testing (SAST) market. It’s a significant development for WhiteSource, which has until now been solely focused on open source software security. In this post, I explain why we decided to make this move beyond open source into proprietary code security, and the value it will bring to developers, security teams, and their organizations.

In 2021, the WhiteSource Diffend automated malware detection platform detected and reported more than 1,200 malicious npm packages that were responsible for stealing credentials and crypto, as well as for running botnets and collecting host information from machines on which they were installed.

In the latter part of December 2021, WhiteSource Diffend detected the new release of a package called @maui-mf/app-auth. This package used a vector of attack that was similar to the server side request forgery (SSRF) attack against Capital One in 2019, in which a server was tricked into executing commands on behalf of a remote user, thereby enabling the user to treat the server as a proxy for requests and gain access to non-public endpoints.

A number of security vulnerabilities have been identified on the popular freeware, Samba, which implements the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that allows users to access files, printers, and other commonly shared resources over a network. These flaws enable remote attackers the ability to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges on affected installations. The most prominent is CVE-2021-44142, which affects all versions of Samba before 4.13.17.

Since 2009, more than 12 years ago, all major Linux distributions have been incorporating a high severity security hole that remained unnoticed until just recently. The vulnerability and exploit, dubbed “PwnKit” (CVE-2021-4034), uses the vulnerable “pkexec” tool, and allows a local user to gain root system privileges on the affected host. Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems.

At first glance, DevSecOps and Agile can seem like different things. In reality, the methodologies often complement each other. Let’s see how. Agile is a methodology that aims to give teams flexibility during software development. DevSecOps is about adding automated security to an existing automated software development process. Both are methodologies that require high levels of communication between different stakeholders and continuous improvement as part of the process.

​​Since December 10, in a span of just 20 days, there have been four different vulnerabilities published against Log4j. Engineers who worked long hours to update their Log4j versions to 2.15.0 on December 11th, were told three days later that they needed to do it all over again and upgrade to version 2.16.0. This is not sustainable. And yet the risks are high. Looking backward, we see that Log4j has been vulnerable since 2013 to the kinds of attacks described in CVE-2021-44228.

Another — though unlikely — vulnerability was discovered in Log4j’s latest versions: CVE-2021-44832. This is an Arbitrary Code Execution exploit using, yet again, the now infamous JNDI functionality. The vulnerability lets an attacker with control over the Log4j configuration set a malicious datasource for the JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity API) appender. The datasource refers to an attacker-controlled JNDI URI that will execute arbitrary code on the application using Log4j.

The announcement of Log4j vulnerability cve-2021-44228 sent security and development teams into a tailspin and highlights the one of biggest challenges of open source security: dependency management. The open source libraries that make up up to 80% of our applications are often a tangled web of dependencies.