The world runs on software — but few truly understand what’s inside it or who had a hand in its creation.
Recent high-profile breaches, such as those affecting 3CX and XZ Utils, have exposed a sobering truth: attackers no longer need to breach production environments to cause widespread damage. Increasingly, they infiltrate the software supply chain itself — the pipelines, dependencies and tools that organizations rely on to build applications. These attacks often go unnoticed for months, operating with undetectable precision and long dwell times.
Despite billions of dollars invested in vulnerability scanning and static code analysis, modern software development remains dangerously opaque. The software development life cycle (SDLC) is treated like a black box — fast-moving, fragmented and nearly impossible to audit in real time. Tools built to detect bugs can’t answer some of the most critical questions in cybersecurity today:
- Who built this software, and what components were used?
- Was the code or process tampered with at any point?
- Can the development process and final product be verified against SDLC best practices and compliance standards?
These gaps aren’t theoretical — they’re exploited every day by sophisticated threat actors.
A Shift Toward Continuous Assurance
The concept of continuous assurance is gaining momentum as a response to the shortcomings of conventional security tooling. Rather than relying solely on scanning for known vulnerabilities, continuous assurance demands that every element of the SDLC be measured, attested to, and verified by default.
This approach represents a shift from trust by assumption to trust by design.
Scribe Security, a cybersecurity company led by veterans of Israel’s elite cyber defense community, has been instrumental in championing this transformation. The firm promotes an attestation-based model for SDLC security — one that collects and cryptographically signs evidence at every stage of software development.
With this approach, software is no longer assumed to be secure. It can be proven secure.
Key tenets of this methodology include:
- Machine-readable attestations generated throughout the SDLC.
- Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and risk assessments linked to every build and release.
- Policy-as-code guardrails enforcing compliance without introducing developer friction.
- Continuous signing and verification of code provenance and integrity integrated directly into DevOps workflows.
The Rising Stakes
The urgency behind these solutions is clear. According to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), software supply chain attacks have surged by 650% over the last five years. Regulatory and compliance pressures are mounting in parallel, driven by new mandates like the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) from NIST, Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA), and Executive Order 14144, which requires verifiable attestations and SBOMs for vendors contracting with the U.S. government.
Security leaders are now tasked not only with protecting their code — but with proving, through verifiable evidence, that they have done so. This shift has raised the bar for what it means to be “secure” in software development.
Scribe Security’s platform operationalizes this new standard. Leading financial institutions, defense contractors and cybersecurity firms are already leveraging the company’s technology to:
- Apply cryptographic verification throughout the entire SDLC.
- Eliminate visibility gaps across hybrid, cloud-native and air-gapped development environments.
- Automate governance and compliance with modern software supply chain standards at scale.
- Enable security without slowing down developers — a crucial balance in today’s competitive markets.
Advancing the Standard with NIST
Scribe’s influence extends beyond its product. The company is actively collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) on the Software Supply Chain and DevOps Security Practices initiative. The project focuses on real-world implementation of the SSDF and seeks to create usable frameworks for security-conscious organizations.
This collaboration marks a critical step toward making secure-by-design development not just a theoretical model, but a practical reality for enterprises large and small.
Rethinking Trust in the Software Age
In today’s threat landscape, the software factory itself is a critical attack surface. Trust must now be earned — not through checklists or assumptions, but through cryptographic proof, gathered continuously across the software lifecycle.
Continuous assurance isn’t just a better security strategy. It’s the connective tissue between speed, trust and compliance. As regulatory demands rise and attackers grow more sophisticated, it may be the only viable path forward.
For organizations serious about securing their software supply chains, the message is clear: vulnerability scanning alone is no longer enough. Trust must be verifiable — continuously, by default, and by design.
