Introduction

  • 3 minutes

Modern applications depend heavily on open-source components and third-party libraries. While these dependencies accelerate development and provide proven functionality, they also introduce security vulnerabilities and license compliance risks. Software Composition Analysis (SCA) provides automated tools and processes for identifying, tracking, and managing the security and compliance risks in your software supply chain.

Without systematic dependency analysis, organizations remain unaware of vulnerabilities in their applications until breaches occur. Security researchers discover thousands of new vulnerabilities in open-source components annually, and applications using affected versions remain vulnerable until dependencies are updated. Manual tracking of dependencies across hundreds of applications is impractical, requiring automated SCA solutions.

This module provides comprehensive guidance on implementing Software Composition Analysis in your development workflows. You'll learn SCA fundamentals, implement automated vulnerability detection with GitHub Dependabot, integrate SCA tools into Azure Pipelines, automate container scanning, and interpret security alerts to prioritize remediation effectively.

What you'll learn

This module covers essential knowledge for implementing Software Composition Analysis:

  • Understanding Software Composition Analysis: You'll explore what SCA is, why it's critical for modern development, what SCA tools detect, and the benefits of automated dependency scanning. Understanding SCA fundamentals helps you recognize why manual dependency management doesn't scale and how automated tools provide continuous visibility into security and compliance risks.

  • Inspecting and validating code bases: You'll learn how to inventory all dependencies in your applications, validate license compliance to avoid legal issues, detect known security vulnerabilities through CVE databases, and assess dependency quality including maintenance status and community health.

  • Implementing GitHub Dependabot: You'll discover how GitHub Dependabot automatically scans dependencies for vulnerabilities, creates pull requests with security updates, generates dependency graphs showing transitive dependencies, and integrates with GitHub Security tab for centralized vulnerability management.

  • Integrating SCA into pipelines: You'll explore how to implement automated scanning in Azure Pipelines during build and deployment, configure SCA tools including Mend (WhiteSource), Snyk, and OWASP Dependency-Check, establish quality gates that fail builds when critical vulnerabilities are detected, and generate Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for compliance and transparency.

  • Examining SCA tools: You'll compare different SCA solutions understanding their strengths, limitations, and ideal use cases. Tools covered include commercial offerings like Mend and Snyk that provide comprehensive scanning with support, open-source options like OWASP Dependency-Check for cost-effective scanning, and platform-integrated solutions like Azure Artifacts upstream sources and GitHub Dependabot.

  • Automating container scanning: You'll learn how to scan container base images for vulnerabilities, analyze application dependencies within containers, integrate container scanning into CI/CD pipelines, and configure container registries like Azure Container Registry and Docker Hub to block vulnerable images automatically.

  • Interpreting scanner alerts: You'll discover how to assess vulnerability severity using CVSS scores, determine exploitability considering whether vulnerabilities are reachable in your application, prioritize remediation based on business impact and risk, and manage false positives that can overwhelm teams if not properly filtered.

Learning objectives

After completing this module, you'll be able to:

  • Understand Software Composition Analysis (SCA) and recognize why automated dependency scanning is essential for managing security and compliance risks in modern applications built from open-source components.
  • Inspect and validate code bases by inventorying all dependencies including transitive dependencies, validating license compliance, detecting known vulnerabilities through CVE databases, and assessing dependency quality.
  • Implement GitHub Dependabot to automatically detect vulnerable dependencies, receive pull requests with security updates, visualize dependency graphs, and integrate vulnerability alerts with GitHub Security tab.
  • Integrate SCA checks into Azure Pipelines by implementing automated scanning during builds, configuring quality gates that fail builds for critical vulnerabilities, generating compliance reports, and creating Software Bill of Materials (SBOM).
  • Examine and configure SCA tools including commercial solutions like Mend (WhiteSource) and Snyk, open-source tools like OWASP Dependency-Check, and platform-integrated solutions like Azure Artifacts upstream sources.
  • Automate container image scanning to detect vulnerabilities in base images and application dependencies, integrate scanning into CI/CD workflows, and configure registries to prevent deploying vulnerable containers.
  • Interpret alerts from scanning tools by assessing severity with CVSS scores, determining exploitability and reachability, prioritizing remediation based on business impact, and managing false positives effectively.

Prerequisites

Before starting this module, you should have:

  • Understanding of software dependencies: Basic knowledge of how applications use libraries, frameworks, and packages from package managers like npm, pip, NuGet, or Maven.
  • Familiarity with DevOps concepts: Understanding of continuous integration, continuous delivery, build pipelines, and the software development lifecycle.
  • Version control experience: Basic experience with Git, pull requests, and code review workflows where dependency management typically occurs.
  • Open-source awareness: General understanding that open-source components can contain security vulnerabilities and have license requirements (knowledge from previous modules is beneficial).
  • Azure DevOps or GitHub experience: Familiarity with either Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions for implementing automated scanning in CI/CD workflows.

Experience working in organizations that deliver software is beneficial but not required. This module builds on open-source software concepts and provides practical implementation guidance for Software Composition Analysis.