As part of our ongoing efforts to offer you the most comprehensive and advanced SDLC protection capabilities, JFrog continues to boost the capabilities of our Xray security and compliance product. In this blog, we offer an overview of recent Xray improvements, all aimed at helping you fortify your software, reduce risk, scale security, streamline compliance and accelerate releases with confidence.

JFrog’s Security Research team recently disclosed an RCE (remote code execution) issue in Apache Cassandra, which has been assigned to CVE-2021-44521 (CVSS 8.4). This Apache security vulnerability is easy to exploit and has the potential to wreak havoc on systems, but luckily only manifests in non-default configurations of Cassandra.

The JFrog Security research team continuously monitors popular open source software (OSS) repositories with our automated tooling to detect and avert potential software supply chain security threats. After validating the findings, the team reports any security vulnerabilities or malicious packages discovered to repository maintainers and the wider community.

With security now a critical “must have” for DevOps teams, JFrog significantly deepened and extended our platform’s already solid security capabilities in 2021. In this post, we’ll look back at our major advances last year – and look forward at what’s to come in 2022.

Recently, a critical out-of-bounds vulnerability, assigned to CVE-2021-44142, was disclosed in Samba versions prior to 4.13.17. The Samba vulnerability carries a critical CVSS of 9.9 and allows attackers to remotely execute code on machines running a Samba server with a vulnerable configuration. The vulnerability was disclosed as part of the Pwn2Own Austin competition where researchers are challenged to exploit widely-used software and devices with unknown vulnerabilities.

Just like many other production DevOps engineering teams, our JFrog team deploys new version releases several times a day to AWS, Azure and GCP, across more than 20 cloud regions. This process used to take us many hours and could have even failed if it was done alongside maintenance by other teams.

If you didn’t attend our recently concluded DevOps Cloud Days online conference, you missed a learning event that those who did called “fantastic” and “meaningful.” In written feedback, developers, operations staff, and security admins who attended described the presentations as “powerful,” “inspiring” and “excellent.” Fortunately, it wasn’t your last chance to share that fruitful experience with us.

Make no mistake: You can’t overlook software distribution in DevOps. At risk are the reliability, security and speed of your software releases — and your business itself. This is especially true in enterprises that are releasing across numerous edge endpoints or IoT devices. As your releases’ cadence and payload grow, software distribution challenges multiply, particularly at the edge.

Last week, a critical vulnerability identified as CVE-2022-0185 was disclosed, affecting Linux kernel versions 5.1 to 5.16.1. The security vulnerability is an integer underflow in the Filesystem Context module that allows a local attacker to run arbitrary code in the context of the kernel, thus leading to privilege escalation, container environment escape, or denial of service.

Modern software projects are mostly composed of open source code. The question of who really controls this code, and is responsible for detecting and fixing software supply chain security issues, became a significant source of concern after the discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability.