Evaluating your supply chain security

A framework for supply chain evaluation

So how does your supply chain stack up? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do you require signed commits?
Do you use git hooks or automated scans to prevent committing secrets to source control?
Have you defined an unacceptable risk level for vulnerabilities? For example: no code may be committed that includes Critical or High vulnerabilities
Do you use automated scanning to detect and prevent security issues, vulnerable dependencies, etc. from being committed to the repo that are not in compliance with your defined risk threshold?
Have you defined clear contributors roles? Are they documented and discoverable?
Do you enforce review and approval of contributions prior to merging?
Are branch protection rules in place?
Do you enforce MFA and SSH keys for human-entities? Do you have a plan in place for rotating SSH keys at regular intervals or following a key leak?
Do you limit the access of automation agents (like CI/CD pipelines) following the principles of least privilege and just-in-time?

Do you verify that dependencies meet your minimum thresholds for quality and reliability?
Do you automatically scan dependencies for security issues and license compliance?
Do you automatically perform Software Composition Analysis on dependencies when they are downloaded/installed?
Do you monitor dependencies for updates and security issues?
Do you build dependencies yourself instead of relying on public package managers?
Do you create an SBOM of your own artefacts?

Do you use hardened, minimal containers as the foundation for your build workers?
Do you maintain your build and test pipelines as Infrastructure-as-Code?
Do you automate every step in your build pipeline outside of code reviews and final sign-offs?
Do you sign the output of every step in your build pipeline to provide a verifiable guarantee?
Do you validate the signatures and checksums of all dependencies before ingesting them in a build stage?
Do you use separate build workers/containers for each step in your build pipeline?
Do your pipeline orchestrator pass in the environments, tools, and commands allowed on each build worker?
Do you network isolate your build workers and pipeline as much as possible?
Do you produce verifiable, reproducible builds?

Is every artefact you produce (including metadata and intermediate artefacts) signed?
Do you distribute metadata in a way that can be verified by downstream consumers of your products?
Can your downstream consumers verify/validate any artefact they ingest from you before they use/deploy it?

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