What is JFrog Security?

The security of the software supply chain is rapidly becoming a paramount concern for organizations — and for good reason. With the increasing number of published Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), developers face the challenge of delivering software faster than ever before. However, in their quest for speed, many dev and security teams have resorted to fragmented security solutions, inadvertently leaving critical gaps in coverage and compromising their competitive advantage.

To address this pressing issue, teams require comprehensive control and holistic visibility into the security of their software supply chain. This is where JFrog Security comes into play. As the industry’s only DevOps-centric security solution, JFrog unifies developers, operations, and security teams, providing end-to-end protection for the entire software supply chain. In this blog, we’ll explore what JFrog Security entails, how it’s utilized by DevOps and security teams, and the value it brings to the software delivery process.

End-to-end security for your software supply chain

With so many interlocking parts, the software supply chain is rife with opportunities for malicious attackers. Any compromises in the software supply chain can be used as entry points to disrupt critical functions.

Developers pull most of the software they use from public open source and commercial repositories, blindly trusting that they don’t contain security and compliance issues. Security risks begin the moment developers start downloading libraries from the internet. Most of these third-party components have vulnerabilities and other security problems – and over 30 percent of them are ranked as High or Critical by the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).

Security point solutions vs. platform approach

When it comes to software supply chain security, opting for a platform solution offers multiple advantages over relying on individual security point solutions. A platform solution provides a comprehensive and integrated approach to security, offering a centralized and unified view of the entire software supply chain. This holistic perspective enables better visibility and control over security risks throughout the software development lifecycle.

Additionally, a platform solution ensures consistency in security practices and policies, eliminating the need for managing multiple disparate tools and reducing complexity. By choosing a platform solution like JFrog, organizations can streamline their security efforts, enhance collaboration between development, operations, and security teams, and ultimately strengthen their overall security posture.

JFrog Security capabilities

JFrog Security is natively integrated into the JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform and specializes in software composition analysis (SCA), code scanning (SAST), container scanning, CVE prioritization with advanced scanners, and open source software package curation.

JFrog Security identifies security vulnerabilities and license compliance violations as early as the dependency declaration stage, and can block the download of malicious or risky open source packages even before they enter an organization. It can also block the creation of builds that may pose security threats in the form of high or critical severity CVEs, operational risk, malicious packages or certain exposures like secrets or poorly configured services. The tools let organizations enforce security measures throughout their Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), whether in artifact repositories, CI/CD tools and processes, or even the integrated development environment.

JFrog Security capabilities include:

Software Package Curation

JFrog Curation is a package-curating solution that enhances the security measures of your entire software supply chain by stopping open-source security threats from ever entering your organization. It integrates seamlessly into your software development lifecycle from the very beginning of your software supply chain, so you can be confident your teams are always using trusted, low-risk, and up-to-date packages.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

SAST has been around for a long time, but has had some major drawbacks, such as providing too many false positives, slow scans, and lack of analysis beyond single-source files. Additionally, SAST tools have been difficult to integrate and often not properly integrated with end-to-end pipeline processes. JFrog SAST tooling gives our Advanced Security customers comprehensive security on their binaries, as well as the bespoke code developers are composing, including code generated by Gen AI. JFrog SAST is also lightweight and doesn’t slow developers down.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Modern applications are rarely built using native organization code alone. While the increased availability of open source packages has allowed teams to accelerate application development, it also poses increased security risk. SCA is an application security method that development teams use to quickly scan their dependencies for security vulnerabilities. By scanning code for vulnerabilities at the binary level, JFrog Security ensures that every software element – from code to production – is secure and compliant.

Secrets Detection

A secret represents a sensitive piece of information crucial for accessing confidential systems. Whether it’s an API key, password, or any other credential, secrets play a vital role in authenticating and safeguarding the components of your software development process. JFrog Security detects any secrets left exposed in the artifacts and builds stored in Artifactory to prevent the accidental leak of internal tokens or credentials. In addition to revealing the exposure, JFrog Security gives you additional, actionable information so you can take confident next steps.

Container Scanning

Container scanning is the process of scanning all of the layers within a container to identify each of the vulnerabilities within its images and components. One of the most common pain points developers have regarding SCA tools is that they generate too many results, leading developers to fix too many vulnerabilities that don’t actually impose any risks. With JFrog’s container scanning tools, rather than having to “simply fix everything,” developers can focus on fixing the right vulnerabilities with minimal effort.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security

IaC security refers to the best practice of addressing cloud configuration issues at the infrastructure code layer – rather than already deployed cloud resources. JFrog’s IaC security embeds scalable and consistent cloud security coverage that functions to detect issues earlier on in order to mitigate vulnerabilities at runtime. It lets organizations enforce security measures throughout their SDLC, whether in artifact repositories, CI/CD tools and processes, or even the integrated development environment.

Advanced Security Scanning

JFrog Advanced Security extends the capabilities of JFrog Xray by providing a comprehensive set of innovative features to help organizations secure their software supply chain beyond the scope of SCA. In essence, JFrog Advanced Security fortifies the security of your software supply chain, minimizing the likelihood of security breaches and enhancing your overall security posture.

Contextual Analysis

Package scanning can potentially result in thousands of vulnerabilities. This leaves developers with the tedious task of sifting through long lists to identify the relevance of these vulnerabilities,  many of which may not affect your artifacts. Vulnerability Contextual Analysis uses the artifact context to remove false positive reports on vulnerabilities that aren’t relevant. This process involves automated scanners running on top of the container to find reachable paths for the analyzed vulnerabilities to assist you in figuring out which vulnerabilities are applicable to a specific artifact and how to remediate them.

Integration with other JFrog products and wider ecosystem

JFrog Security is natively integrated with JFrog Artifactory, forming the JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform. In fact, they’re the only holistic application security scanning tools that are integrated into a comprehensive software artifact management platform.

With access to the wealth of metadata stored in Artifactory, combined with deep binary scanning, and innovative security capabilities, JFrog Security is unique in the software supply chain security space. Developers using the tools can analyze the relationships between binary artifacts and get profound transparency into component architecture, revealing how a vulnerability in one component impacts others, your builds, and repositories.

Moreover, a binary artifact repository like JFrog Artifactory can serve as a proxy server, significantly strengthening security in software development and deployment processes. Acting as an intermediary between the development environment and external repositories, a proxy server caches and stores artifacts locally, reducing the reliance on external sources and mitigating the risk of external threats.

Summary

Experience the most DevOps-centric and comprehensive security offering available today in a unified Software Supply Chain Platform — including an array of capabilities, such as software composition analysis, container scanning, secrets detection, CVE prioritization, service & configuration exposures, software package curation, and static application security testing.

Control and secure your software supply chain in one unified platform. See JFrog Security tools in action by joining a group or 1:1 demo session.