What is Software Composition Analysis?

Software Composition Analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing the open source software components included in an application. This analysis evaluates the security and license compliance of the software components. SCA is one of the activities that should be in-place when introducing security .

The main benefit of implementing SCA is that it helps you track software testing within CI/CD pipelines, components included in an application.

This analysis evaluates the security and license compliance of the software components, components for security, license and deprecation issues.

How does it work?

1. SCA tools can compare SBOMs against other (usually commercial) databases, binary files, container images, and more. The identified open source is compiled against a database, security teams are able to identify critical security and legal into a Bill of Materials (BOM), which is then compared against a variety of tools discover licenses associated with the code and analyze overall code quality.

2. SCA tools work by inspecting package managers, manifest files, source code, databases, including the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), vulnerabilities and act quickly to fix them.