Endor Labs unveiled two capabilities, Upgrade Impact Analysis and Endor Magic Patches, that fix an expensive and time-consuming problem in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) market.
Software version upgrades are often required to fix critical vulnerabilities in open source software (OSS) dependencies. However, those upgrades can be difficult to implement without causing breaking changes to applications, making it hard to actually reduce risk.
The Director of AppSec Operations for a major Fintech company told the Endor Labs team: “Developers fear upgrades because of breaking changes. Imagine if the product could emulate an upgrade to show which upgrade could impact which packages. With this information, I could prioritize fixes based on how hard the upgrade will be, and how many other packages will be affected.”
AppSec teams now get intel about how difficult a given upgrade can be, including what could break. This makes it easy to have conversations with Engineering about scoping security fixes and setting service-level agreements (SLAs). And when the evidence indicates the cost of upgrading will be too high, such as in the case of a foundational package that could take months or years to upgrade, teams can choose to immediately mitigate the vulnerability with a backported security patch maintained by Endor Labs.
Marcelo Oliveira, VP of Product Management at Endor Labs, said: “One of the best characteristics of OSS is the degree of constant improvement—there’s a regular flow of upgrades to just about every package. However, the merits can often be outweighed by the dangers. With these new capabilities, teams can clear this hurdle by sharply reducing the work required to understand the impact of dependency upgrades, and stay safe when the risk of upgrades is too high. It’s always been our mission to make security less of a burden on software engineers, and with this launch we continue to help security teams become better partners.”
While SCA offerings typically provide information on non-vulnerable versions, none include remediation advice that’s grounded in the context unique to each application. By contrast, Endor Labs uses program analysis at the time of build to see exactly which third-party dependencies are used and how they interact with the application code. A deep understanding of the application is what makes it possible to get an accurate software inventory, eliminate noise based on reachability, and accurately predict breaking changes.
With this release, Endor Labs users unlock two capabilities: Upgrade Impact Analysis and Endor Magic Patches.
By extending the program analysis engine to identify unintended consequences such as breaking changes to an application, AppSec teams can manage risk in the context of difficulty. Because they understand how various fix options will impact the application, they can:
- Improve return on investment of remediation efforts: Identify which upgrades can have the highest security impact in conjunction with the effort it takes
- Give time back to developers: Reduce the need for manual research by providing developers with a prioritized list of upgrades ranked by complexity and impact
- Address risks faster: Make informed estimations of fix efforts with standardized research so they can quickly implement low effort/low risk fixes and make prioritization decisions for complex fixes.
Endor Magic Patches eliminate the hassle of hard-to-perform upgrades by providing security patches that are backported to the vulnerable version. The source code, patches, test, build and deploy steps are available to inspect, and the builds are completely reproducible and hermetic. AppSec teams can:
- Respond to emerging threats: Be ready for the next Spring4Shell with peace of mind that they can obtain a patch to ensure the organization stays safe while the team works to upgrade dependencies
- Balance developer workloads: Reduce the urgency of upgrading so developers can focus on releasing their planned features without unexpected delays
- Support FedRAMP compliance: Mitigate vulnerability risk to protect sensitive information in alignment with government requirements.