Most software organizations use multiple platforms for code management, build, registry, delivery, and deployment. Governing the security of the SDLC and software supply chain requires a unified platform that extends beyond GitHub’s native capabilities. Effective risk management demands clear traceability and governance from code to cloud—ensuring every container image and released artifact is linked to its source.
Organizations use various tools for secure application development. This creates a need to govern and attest to their outputs as part of a secure development process (as required by EO 14144). Such attestation includes evidence like SBOMs and results from security measures such as code review scanning, artifact signing, build isolation, and provenance capture.
Modern applications are complex, often involving multiple artifacts such as container images and composite releases. Managing SDLC and supply chain security at the product, version, and release levels is essential for generating the necessary attestations and analyzing risk.
Scribe Security addresses these challenges by offering:
Contextual Policy Enforcement
- Custom security policies are applied as gated controls at critical steps—code, build, and deployment—to ensure that required security measures are enforced throughout the development process.
- Scribe’s policies are managed as code via GitOps, providing a catalog of 150 prebuilt security policies mapped to compliance frameworks that can be forked, customized, and extended.
- These policies are version-controlled, ensuring they remain tamper-proof and consistently applied across the entire SDLC.
GitHub Comparison:
- Configuration Options: GitHub offers security settings (branch protections, required reviews, secret scanning, etc.) that can be configured per repository or organization.
- Scope Limitations: Although GitHub dashboards (e.g., Security Overview) provide visibility, they do not enforce policies across the entire SDLC.
Integrity
- Scribe provides code and artifact signing, with validation at multiple gates (e.g., build and admission control).
- The platform supports signing with customer-managed keys using PKI and Sigstore integrations.
GitHub Comparison:
- Artifact Attestations: GitHub Actions can generate attestations that capture build provenance and are signed with Sigstore.
- Configuration-Dependent: This requires deliberate setup and does not support signing with customer-managed keys and validation at multiple validation points.
Compliance & Supply Chain Assurance
- Scribe continuously generates machine-readable attestations that comply with frameworks such as SLSA and regulations like EO 14144.
- Integrated security attestations capture evidence from the development process and can be aggregated at the artifact, product, and release levels for audit and compliance.
GitHub Comparison:
- Artifact Provenance & SBOMs: GitHub supports build provenance and can export SBOM data, but these features operate at the repository or artifact level and require manual aggregation for enterprise-wide reporting.
Risk Analysis
- Scribe continuously assesses risk across the SDLC by detecting vulnerabilities, identifying integrity breaches, flagging orphaned workloads, and monitoring SDLC policy violations.
- This integrated risk analysis provides actionable insights for prioritizing remediation.
GitHub Comparison:
- Vulnerability Alerts: GitHub offers alerts through tools like Dependabot and CodeQL, but risk data is often siloed by a repository without integrated analysis of broader policy or integrity issues.
Continuous Discovery & Lineage Generation
- Scribe automates the discovery of development assets and creates clear code-to-cloud lineages while identifying orphaned production workloads that lack traceability.
GitHub Comparison:
- Security Dashboards: GitHub’s Security Overview provides insights into vulnerabilities and configurations across repositories.
- Limited Discovery: GitHub does not automatically discover all development assets or deliver an end-to-end lineage from code to cloud.
Summary
While GitHub offers a range of security features, they often require manual configuration and lack unified, continuous oversight across the entire SDLC. Scribe Security fills these gaps by delivering end-to-end visibility, contextual policy enforcement, integrated attestations, and comprehensive risk analysis across the software lifecycle.
Of course, GitHub’s security features are limited to GitHub, while Scribe Security covers all DevOps platforms and CI/CD tools.
This content is brought to you by Scribe Security, a leading end-to-end software supply chain security solution provider – delivering state-of-the-art security to code artifacts and code development and delivery processes throughout the software supply chains. Learn more.
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