Software composition analysis (SCA) tools analyze applications to identify open source and third-party components with vulnerabilities and/or license compliance conflicts. Additionally, SCA solutions provide suggested fixes for issues they detect, which goes a long way toward ensuring applications don’t contain major security, licensing, or quality issues.
There are several differences, but perhaps the biggest is that SCA solutions are designed to analyze and identify potential issues in open source software components. In contrast, tools like DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), SAST (Static Application Security Testing), and IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing) analyze proprietary code (and also tend to be used a little bit later in the software development lifecycle). It is common, however, for organizations to implement both SCA and one or more proprietary code testing solutions.
Open source software is everywhere in modern application development — it’s estimated that OSS comprises north of 90% of the average codebase. But for all the benefits of OSS (it’s cost-effective, saves time, and more), it also carries some measure of risk. Software composition analysis solutions inventory the open source components in your codebase and flag potential license compliance, security, and quality issues. This helps organizations make sure they distribute high-quality applications that are free of major vulnerabilities and potentially problematic open source licenses.
In earlier years of software development, security testing was often conducted toward the end of the SDLC. However, the later in the SDLC compliance or vulnerability issues are detected, the more costly and time-consuming it is to resolve them. As such, most FOSSA customers choose to integrate our software composition analysis solution with their CI/CD pipeline, as part of the build process. Any time a new change is committed and a build is triggered, a new scan happens. This provides immediate feedback to developers very early in the dev cycle and reduces the cost of resolving the issue.
There are several reasons why numerous organizations, including leading enterprises like Uber, Twitter, Verizon, and PWC, use FOSSA’s software composition analysis solution. Here are a few of the biggest:
Different software composition analysis vendors have different pricing structures. You can view FOSSA’s pricing on our website.
Yes! A key devsecops principle is that testing should be conducted as early as possible in the software development lifecycle. This idea is also known as “shifting left.” Software composition analysis helps devsecops teams implement the shift-left philosophy by flagging problematic open source components any time a new change is committed and a build triggered.