Jetstack promotes better security with supply chain toolkit

Jetstack has launched an interactive and comprehensive toolkit built to aid in securing modern software supply chains.

The visual, web-based resource is available to everyone and is designed to help organisations evaluate and plan the crucial steps they need to establish effective software supply chain security.

Software supply chain security has become an increasingly critical issue for all organisations, the company states.

After the attack against Solar Winds at the end of 2020 that affected over 1800 companies, software supply chain attacks increased over 300% in 2021.

Jetstack chief technology officer Matthew Bates says, "Most organisations now understand the urgency and importance of improving the security of the software they consume and produce.

"The problem is that it's very challenging to identify and prioritise the changes that need to be made whilst also managing the competing priorities of their development and security communities."

Bates says, "It's very difficult to figure out how to continually improve development velocity and reduce time to deployment while, at the same time, improve control, visibility and security. Our toolkit helps development and security teams quickly figure out where to start by identifying the difficulty and impact connected to specific security controls."

The Software Supply Chain toolkit consolidates advice and recommendations from multiple frameworks and whitepapers that each provide comprehensive guidance for software supply chain security including:

• CNCF Software Supply Chain Best Practices whitepaper
• The Linux Foundation SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts)
• NIST Guidance on Executive Order 14028 Improving Software Supply Chain Security
• Venafi blueprint for building secure software development pipelines

The interactive toolkit presents the guidance from these frameworks broken down into four key areas: build pipelines, source code, provenance and deployment.

Recommendations from each section include insights on priority and complexity along with links to the original open source toolsets that can help with that specific recommendation.

Steve Judd, senior solutions architect for Jetstack and the developer of the toolkit, says, "Software supply chain attacks target a whole range of vulnerabilities at different points in the software life cycle."

Judd continues, "Solving these challenges requires going through a whole range of controls that go well beyond a software bill of materials (SBOMs), which is just one of the 54 recommendations."

"The Software Supply Chain toolkit is a new type of collaboration with the open source community designed to help the industry develop proactive and preventative solutions that are purpose built for existing and emerging development processes," he concludes.

Jetstack, a Venafi company, is a cloud native products and strategic consulting company working with enterprises using Kubernetes and OpenShift.

Jetstack's open source products and solutions are designed to protect the application environments and platform infrastructure of global banks, multinational retailing companies and defence organisations.