Ep. 120: Addressing Root Cause - Vulnerable Components

DevelopSec: Developing Security Awareness

In this episode we talk about addressing the root cause of an issue versus the symptoms. How can the process of keeping application components updated be improved?

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Transcript:

In this episode, James talks about root cause analysis versus treating the symptoms.

Tackling the challenge to integrate security into the development process, looking for insights, answers and practical solutions to avoid getting overwhelmed. Welcome to the develop SEC podcast where our focus is your success in securing and improving development processes. And here's your host, James Jardine. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show. Today, I want to talk about addressing the symptoms versus addressing the root problem. And I think in application security, or when we talk about secure development, this is something where a lot of times we address the symptoms, but we never really take the step back to address the actual root cause of what's causing those symptoms. And today, I want to actually talk about vulnerable third party components. This is something that has been kind of brought to the attention a lot more in the past few years, made it into the OWASP, top 10. And it's something I think everybody struggles with, we never know when we'll have a vulnerable third party component, because until somebody actually identifies a vulnerability, we just assume that we're good. And then on top of that, if there is a vulnerability identified, then we also run the chances that we're probably not even using that feature.

So vulnerable third party components are a really interesting aspect, when we think about secure development. Because there is a lot of unknowns, we may know that there's a vulnerability there. But the actual knowledge of do we use that piece and are we vulnerable, can be difficult, which, in the end, ends up adding a whole bunch of extra work and a whole lot of time for us to try to figure this out and address this stuff. And so this is where I talk about addressing the symptoms. In this case, in a lot of places, what we do is we address that symptom, we know that there's an issue of vulnerable third party components, right, that's the symptom, we have a vulnerable third party component. And so most places have some sort of process in place where we're going to identify these right, we're going to scan them all the time, whether using some of the common commercial tools, maybe you're using a free open source tool. But basically, the way it goes is I'm going to scan my repos or I'm going to scan my packages, and I'm going to look for all the dependencies, and then I'll look at their dependencies, and we'll see if there's any known vulnerable components within these right. And that requires having some sort of CVE out there that says, hey, somebody has found this, they've reported it, I remember requiring this to be a rep

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