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Safety and Security for Automotive Systems

Open source software (OSS) has become an integral part of development in the automotive industry. OSS helps fuel innovations in areas like AI, autonomous driving, and connected cars, which are driving growth and profitability.

Of course, for all of its benefits, open source also comes with some measure of risk. Without the proper processes and tools in place, automotive organizations may struggle to fulfill license compliance requirements and mitigate security vulnerabilities.

Table of Contents

FOSSA for a Secure and Trusted Automotive Ecosystem

  • License Compliance: Open source has become an important part of the supply chain for automotive manufacturers. With hundreds of different licenses, ranging from permissive to strong copyleft — and multiple layers of dependencies — compliance should be a priority to avoid legal risk, including the possibility of being forced to release  source code, and the possibility of significant financial and reputational damage.
  • Software Bill of Materials: Software bill of materials (SBOM) helps organizations track and manage software components, vulnerabilities, and software licenses. FOSSA supports every stage of the SBOM management lifecycle, from generating and managing SBOM documents to importing third-party SBOMs.
  • Vulnerability Detection and Management: Vulnerabilities like Log4Shell highlight the importance of maintaining real-time, accurate visibility into your open source dependencies and their vulnerabilities, as well as having the infrastructure to support rapid remediation.
  • Code Quality: Staying on top of risk signals — like outdated or stale packages — is a proactive way to reduce potential OSS security risk. FOSSA provides this intelligence to help your security team stay ahead.
“It’s critical to find a solution that is not only friendly to lawyers or engineering leadership but has great experience for day-to-day developers. FOSSA gives you both, and it’s hard to find a solution that has that currently in the market."

-Chris Aniszczyk, CTO and Co-Founder, Cloud Native Computing Foundation

FOSSA is a modern, devops-friendly open source management platform that enables:

  • Comprehensive Vulnerability Detection: Security teams benefit from a continuously updated vulnerability database that fuels real-time alerts across all projects.
  • Intelligent Issue Resolution: Automotive organizations get actionable guidance to resolve compliance issues and remediate vulnerabilities.
  • Developer-Friendly: Developers get compliance violation alerts in real time via Slack, Jira, or email, and can make any code changes directly in their preferred environments.
  • Improved Code Quality: Identify and replace outdated components and reduce technical debt with FOSSA’s Quality Feature.
  • Broad Ecosystem Support: Identify and resolve security and compliance risk across a wide range of languages
  • Strong Access Control: Follow principles of least privilege with customizable roles and permissions.
  • Fast Time to Market: FOSSA integrates with commonly used build systems (e.g., Travis, Jenkins, CircleCI) and repositories (e.g., GitLab, Bitbucket, GitHub), enabling automotive development organizations to shift left and accelerate the SDLC.
  • Automated Reporting: Compile SBOMs and stay audit-ready with real-time, standardized reporting at scale across a variety of development environments.
“I tell everyone inside Milliman who will listen that they need FOSSA. My message is: Run, don’t walk, to adopt and implement it.”

Charles Hoffman, Milliman Principal and Director of Software Development