Open source libraries have become an indispensable part of modern applications. Approximately 90% of organizations use open source software to support their services, but monitoring these dependencies can be difficult when environments run thousands of ephemeral services. The complex nature of modern applications, in combination with the challenge of keeping a competitive edge in a fast-moving market, can make it difficult for organizations to identify and remediate threats in a timely manner.
I was inspired to write this after reading a post from Thomas Depierre on Mastodon. The post touched on something that’s been troubling me recently. When it comes to software security, we spend a lot of time talking about the software supply chain and related concepts, such as the software bill of materials (SBOM). This metaphor comes from an industrial lexicon. People who are used to talking about economies and how manufacturing works are familiar with the idea of supply chain.
Mass assignment, also known as autobinding or object injection, is a category of vulnerabilities that occur when user input is bound to variables or objects within a program. Mass assignment vulnerabilities are often the result of an attacker adding unexpected fields to an object to manipulate the logic of a program.