Analyzing Challenges in Deployment of the SLSA Framework for Software Supply Chain Security

TL;DR

This study investigates the challenges and strategies related to adopting the SLSA framework for software supply chain security by analyzing GitHub issues, revealing key difficulties and potential solutions to improve adoption.

Contribution

It provides a qualitative analysis of 1,523 GitHub issues using LDA to identify main challenges and strategies for SLSA adoption, offering insights for practitioners and framework developers.

Findings

Main challenges are complex implementation and unclear communication.

Strategies include streamlining provenance generation and enhancing documentation.

Some challenges require future research and tool development.

Abstract

In 2023, Sonatype reported a 200\% increase in software supply chain attacks, including major build infrastructure attacks. To secure the software supply chain, practitioners can follow security framework guidance like the Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA). However, recent surveys and industry summits have shown that despite growing interest, the adoption of SLSA is not widespread. To understand adoption challenges, \textit{the goal of this study is to aid framework authors and practitioners in improving the adoption and development of Supply-Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) through a qualitative study of SLSA-related issues on GitHub}. We analyzed 1,523 SLSA-related issues extracted from 233 GitHub repositories. We conducted a topic-guided thematic analysis, leveraging the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) unsupervised machine learning algorithm, to explore the challenges of adopting SLSA and the strategies for overcoming these challenges. We identified four significant challenges and five suggested adoption strategies. The two main challenges reported are complex implementation and unclear communication, highlighting the difficulties in implementing and understanding the SLSA process across diverse ecosystems. The suggested strategies include streamlining provenance generation processes, improving the SLSA verification process, and providing specific and detailed documentation. Our findings indicate that some strategies can help mitigate multiple challenges, and some challenges need future research and tool enhancement.