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Google today launched a GitHub app that provides automated continuous enforcement of security best practices for GitHub projects.
Kim Lewandowski, a product manager for open source software security at Google, said the Allstar application enables IT teams to assess any project on GitHub to check for security policy adherence. In addition, Allstar sets desired enforcement actions and automatically applies those rules when triggered by a setting or file change in a repository.
The goal is to provide the open source community with a tool that makes it possible for organizations to have more confidence in the open source software that is being employed within a software supply chain, said Lewandowski.
Allstar is intended as a companion application for Security Scorecards, a tool that Google made available last year to assess whether, for example, an open source project employs branch protection to ensure that malware isn’t inadvertently committed to a project. Allstar continuously checks expected GitHub API states and repository file contents against security policies and the enforcement actions defined by an IT organization. After it detects a policy violation, the tool can be configured to simply send an alert or to automatically enforce a specific policy to remediate the issue, said Lewandoski. Specifically, she said the options available are to log the security policy violation without taking any additional action, open a GitHub issue or modify the GitHub setting to match the original Allstar configuration.
At present, Allstar provides a limited number of security policy checks, but more will be made available over the coming months, said Lewandowski. Current security policy checks include branch protection, vulnerability disclosures, access controls and detection of binary artifacts that can’t be scanned. Additional checks that will be added include automatic dependency updates and frozen dependencies.
Lewandowksi said Allstar and Security Scorecards are part of an ongoing Google effort to give back to the open source community that is being targeted by cybercriminals attempting to compromise software supply chains. Just about every application is now dependent on open source components, to some degree. The maintainers of those projects, however, don’t always have the tools or expertise required to check for malware that has been injected into a codebase, she noted.
In general, Lewandoski noted that achieving DevSecOps best practices will require a lot more automation of application security. It’s not possible for each developer to become a world-class cybersecurity expert. The challenge is finding a way to introduce that automation into the application development process as early as possible, which, she noted, in many cases starts with open source components that are incorporated in applications.
It may take a while for every maintainer of an open source project to revamp the processes through which code is added to their project. However, the easier it becomes to continuously review that software, the more confidence organizations that use it will have in its security. In fact, the maintainers of those projects should expect the downstream users of that software to be asking some pointed questions about how security is being managed in the wake of a series of recent high-profile breaches of software supply chains.
