Mobile application development can be costly, and as a result, companies often use off-the-shelf code from third parties to save money and deliver features quickly. Although it provides time and cost benefits, in the long run it can be very risky to your company’s security and even National Security per the recent news of Pushwoosh’s origin if proper security reviews are not implemented.

This latest news highlights the importance of the industry wide push for improved security in the Mobile App Supply Chain. When you are building or using an app you should understand what the app is made of. What code is in the app? Where does it come from? Does it have any known vulnerabilities?

These questions are commonly answered in the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). The SBOM provides the applications developers or consumers with an understanding of what is included in the application and if there are any “bad ingredients” inside. Being able to generate and consume a SBOM for your apps is a great first step towards securing your Mobile App Supply Chain but, as we see in the Pushwoosh story, there is still room for improvement.

The limitation for most SBOM is the intelligence to determine which ingredients are “bad”. The most common approach is to identify the third party code and then search for published vulnerabilities associated with that code in places like the NIST Vulnerability Database. In the case of Pushwoosh there are no known vulnerabilities published and the searches come up clean. So what can you do?

The industry can improve on the standard SBOM approach by introducing active testing of the third-party code through platforms like Q-MAST. This type of testing goes beyond a public vulnerability search and runs the third-party code through a full suite of static, dynamic, interactive and behavioral analysis to identify the “unpublished” weaknesses and traits which can improve the intelligence of your SBOM. Want to know if that weird Pushwoosh library connects to Russia even if they say they are registered in Maryland? Take a page from the Army and test the code yourself to be alerted of the “unpublished” issues before they become public vulnerabilities.

Interested in learning more about securing your mobile app supply chain? You can hear how to get started and what to look for by watching our recent webinar.