Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA, pronounced salsa) is an end-to-end framework for ensuring the integrity of software artifacts throughout the software supply chain. The requirements are inspired by Google’s internal "Binary Authorization for Borg" that has been in use for the past 8+ years and that is mandatory for all of Google's production workloads.
IMPORTANT: SLSA is an evolving specification and we are looking for wide-ranging feedback via GitHub issues, email, or feedback form. SLSA is being developed as part of the OpenSSF Digital Identity WG.
SLSA consists of:
- Standards: (this doc) Industry consensus on the definition of a "secure" software supply chain. There may be multiple standards to represent multiple aspects of security.
- Accreditation: Process for organizations to certify compliance with these standards.
- Technical controls: To record provenance and detect or prevent non-compliance.
Ultimately, the software consumer decides whom to trust and what standards to enforce. In this light, accreditation is a means to transfer trust across organizational boundaries. For example, a company may internally "accredit" its in-house source and build systems while relying on OpenSSF to accredit third-party ones. Other organizations may trust other accreditation bodies.
This document only discusses the first part, Standards. We expect to develop an accreditation process and technical controls over time. In the interim, these levels can provide value as guidelines for how to secure a software supply chain.
SLSA focuses on the following two main principles:
-
Non-unilateral: No person can modify the software artifact anywhere in the software supply chain without explicit review and approval by at least one other "trusted person."1 The purpose is prevention, deterrence, and/or early detection of risky/bad changes.
-
Auditable: The software artifact can be securely and transparently traced back to the original, human readable sources and dependencies. The primary purpose is for automated analyses of sources and dependencies, as well as ad-hoc investigations.
Though not perfect, these two principles provide substantial mitigation for a wide range of tampering, confusion, and other supply chain attacks.
To measure how well protected a supply chain is according to the two principles above, we propose the SLSA levels. A higher level means it is better protected. SLSA 4 is the end goal but may take many years and significant investment for large organizations. SLSA 1 through SLSA 3 are stepping stones to recognize meaningful progress.
What sets SLSA 4 apart from simple best practices is its resilience against determined adversaries. That is, SLSA is a guarantee that these practices have been followed, though still not a guarantee that the software is "safe."
SLSA addresses three issues:
- Software producers want to secure their supply chains but don't know exactly how.
- Software consumers want to understand and limit their exposure to supply chain attacks but have no means of doing so.
- Artifact signatures alone only prevent a subset of the attacks we care about.
At a minimum, SLSA can be used as a set of guiding principles for software producers and consumers. More importantly, SLSA allows us to talk about supply chain risks and mitigations in a common language. This allows us to communicate and act on those risks across organizational boundaries.
Numeric levels, in particular, are useful because they are simple. A decision maker easily understands that SLSA 4 is better than SLSA 3 without understanding any of the details. That said, we are not committed to numeric levels and are open to other options.
Once SLSA is complete it will provide a mapping from requirements that the supply chain can implement to the attacks they can prevent. Software producers and consumers will be able to look at the SLSA level of a software artifact and know what attacks have been defended against in its production.
Consider the example of using curl through its official docker image. What threats are we exposed to in the software supply chain? (We choose curl simply because it is a popular open-source package, not to single it out.)
The first problem is figuring out the actual supply chain. This requires significant manual effort, guesswork, and blind trust. Working backwards:
- The "latest" tag in Docker Hub points to 7.72.0.
- It claims to have come from a Dockerfile in the curl/curl-docker GitHub repository.
- That Dockerfile reads the following artifacts, assuming there are no further
fetches during build time:
- Docker Hub image: registry.hub.docker.com/library/alpine:3.11.5
- Alpine packages: libssh2 libssh2-dev libssh2-static autoconf automake build-base groff openssl curl-dev python3 python3-dev libtool curl stunnel perl nghttp2
- File at URL: https://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem
- Each of the dependencies has its own supply chain, but let's look at curl-dev, which contains the actual "curl" source code.
- The package, like all Alpine packages, has its build script defined in an
APKBUILD
in the Alpine git repo. There are several build dependencies:
- File at URL: https://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.72.0.tar.xz.
- The APKBUILD includes a sha256 hash of this file, which is generated during the final step of the build
- Alpine packages: openssl-dev nghttp2-dev zlib-dev brotli-dev autoconf automake groff libtool perl
- File at URL: https://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.72.0.tar.xz.
- The source tarball was presumably built from the actual upstream GitHub
repository
curl/curl@curl-7_72_0, by
running the commands
./buildconf && ./configure && make && ./maketgz 7.72.0. That command has a set of dependencies, but those are not well documented. - Finally, there are the systems that actually ran the builds above. We have no indication about their software, configuration, or runtime state whatsoever.
Suppose some developer's machine is compromised. What attacks could potentially be performed unilaterally with only that developer's credentials? (None of these are confirmed.)
- Directly upload a malicious image to Docker Hub.
- Point the CI/CD system to build from an unofficial Dockerfile.
- Upload a malicious Dockerfile (or other file) in the curl/curl-docker git repo.
- Upload a malicious https://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem.
- Upload a malicious APKBUILD in Alpine's git repo.
- Upload a malicious curl-dev Alpine package to the Alpine repository. (Not sure if this is possible.)
- Upload a malicious https://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.72.0.tar.xz. (Won't be detected by APKBUILD's hash if the upload happens before the hash is computed.)
- Upload a malicious change to the curl/curl git repo.
- Attack any of the systems involved in the supply chain, as in the SolarWinds attack.
SLSA intends to cover all of these threats. When all artifacts in the supply chain have a sufficient SLSA level, consumers can gain confidence that most of these attacks are mitigated, first via self-certification and eventually through automated verification.
Finally, note that all of this is just for curl's own first-party supply chain steps. The dependencies, namely the Alpine base image and packages, have their own similar threats. And they too have dependencies, which have other dependencies, and so on. Each dependency has its own SLSA level and the composition of SLSA levels describes the entire supply chain's security.
For another look at Docker supply chain security, see Who's at the Helm? For a much broader look at open source security, including these issues and many more, see Threats, Risks, and Mitigations in the Open Source Ecosystem.
When talking about reproducible builds builds, there are two related but distinct concepts: "reproducible" and "verified reproducible."
"Reproducible" means that repeating the build with the same inputs results in bit-for-bit identical output. This property provides many benefits, including easier debugging, more confident cherry-pick releases, better build caching and storage efficiency, and accurate dependency tracking.
For these reasons, SLSA 4 requires reproducible builds unless there is a justification why the build cannot be made reproducible. Example justifications include profile-guided optimizations or code signing that invalidates hashes. Note that there is no actual reproduction, just a claim that reproduction is possible.
"Verified reproducible" means using two or more independent build systems to corroborate the provenance of a build. In this way, one can create an overall system that is more trustworthy than any of the individual components. This is often suggested as a solution to supply chain integrity. Indeed, this is one option to secure build steps of a supply chain. When designed correctly, such a system can satisfy all of the SLSA build requirements.
That said, verified reproducible builds are not a complete solution to supply chain integrity, nor are they practical in all cases:
- Reproducible builds do not address source, dependency, or distribution threats.
- Reproducers must truly be independent, lest they all be susceptible to the same attack. For example, if all rebuilders run the same pipeline software, and that software has a vulnerability that can be triggered by sending a build request, then an attacker can compromise all rebuilders, violating the assumption above.
- Some builds cannot easily be made reproducible, as noted above.
- Closed-source reproducible builds require the code owner to either grant source access to multiple independent rebuilders, which is unacceptable in many cases, or develop multiple, independent in-house rebuilders, which is likely prohibitively expensive.
Therefore, SLSA does not require verified reproducible builds directly. Instead, verified reproducible builds are one option for implementing the requirements.
For more on reproducibility, see Hermetic, Reproducible, or Verifiable?
An artifact is an immutable blob of data. Example artifacts: a file, a git commit, a directory of files (serialized in some way), a container image, a firmware image. The primary use case is for software artifacts, but SLSA can be used for any type of artifact.
A software supply chain is a sequence of steps resulting in the creation of an artifact. We represent a supply chain as a directed acyclic graph of sources, builds, dependencies, and packages. Furthermore, each source, build, and package may be hosted on a platform, such as Source Code Management (SCM) or Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). Note that one artifact's supply chain is a combination of its dependencies' supply chains plus its own sources and builds.
The following diagram shows the relationship between concepts.
| Term | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Artifact that was directly authored or directly by persons, without modification. It is the beginning of the supply chain; we do not trace the provenance back any further. | Git commit (source) hosted on GitHub (platform). |
| Build | Process that transforms a set of input artifacts into a set of output artifacts. The inputs may be sources, dependencies, or ephemeral build outputs. | .travis.yml (process) run by Travis CI (platform). |
| Package | Artifact that is "published" for use by others. In the model, it is always the output of a build process, though that build process can be a no-op. | Docker image (package) distributed on DockerHub (platform). |
| Dependency | Artifact that is an input to a build process but that is not a source. In the model, it is always a package. | Alpine package (package) distributed on Alpine Linux (platform). |
Special cases:
- A ZIP file is containing source code is a package, not a source, because it is built from some other source, such as a git commit.
Reminder: The definitions below are not yet finalized and subject to change, particularly SLSA 3-4.
An artifact's SLSA level describes the integrity strength of its direct supply chain, meaning its direct sources and build steps. To verify that the artifact meets this level, provenance is required. This serves as evidence that the level's requirements have been met.
This section is non-normative.
There are four SLSA levels. SLSA 4 is the current highest level and represents the ideal end state. SLSA 1–3 offer lower security guarantees but are easier to meet. In our experience, achieving SLSA 4 can take many years and significant effort, so intermediate milestones are important.
| Level | Meaning |
|---|---|
| SLSA 4 | "Auditable and Non-Unilateral." High confidence that (1) one can correctly and easily trace back to the original source code, its change history, and all dependencies and (2) no single person has the power to make a meaningful change to the software without review. |
| SLSA 3 | "Auditable." Moderate confidence that one can trace back to the original source code and change history. However, trusted persons still have the ability to make unilateral changes, and the list of dependencies is likely incomplete. |
| SLSA 2 | Stepping stone to higher levels. Moderate confidence that one can determine either who authorized the artifact or what systems produced the artifact. Protects against tampering after the build. |
| SLSA 1 | Entry point into SLSA. Provenance indicates the artifact's origins without any integrity guarantees. |
| Required at | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Requirement | SLSA 1 | SLSA 2 | SLSA 3 | SLSA 4 | |
| Source | Version Controlled | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Verified History | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Retained Indefinitely | 18 mo. | ✓ | |||
| Two-Person Reviewed | ✓ | ||||
| Build | Scripted | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Build Service | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Ephemeral Environment | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Isolated | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Parameterless | ✓ | ||||
| Hermetic | ✓ | ||||
| Reproducible | ○ | ||||
| Provenance | Available | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Authenticated | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Service Generated | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Non-Falsifiable | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Dependencies Complete | ✓ | ||||
| Common | Security | ✓ | |||
| Access | ✓ | ||||
| Superusers | ✓ | ||||
○ = required unless there is a justification
The following is a summary. For details, see corresponding Source, Build/Provenance, and Common documents.
[Source] Requirements for the artifact's top-level source, meaning the one containing the build script:
- [Version Controlled] Every change to the source is tracked in a version control system that identifies who made the change, what the change was, and when that change occurred.
- [Verified History] Every change in the history has at least one strongly authenticated actor identity (author, uploader, reviewer, etc.) and timestamp.
- [Retained Indefinitely] The artifact and its change history are retained indefinitely and cannot be deleted.
- [Two-Person Review] At least two trusted persons agreed to every change in the history.
[Build] Requirements for the artifact's build process:
- [Scripted] All build steps were fully defined in some sort of "build script". The only manual command, if any, was to invoke the build script.
- [Build Service] All build steps ran using some build service, such as a Continuous Integration (CI) platform, not on a developer's workstation.
- [Ephemeral Environment] The build steps ran in an ephemeral environment, such as a container or VM, provisioned solely for this build, and not reused from a prior build.
- [Isolated] The build steps ran in an isolated environment free of influence from other build instances, whether prior or concurrent. Build caches, if used, are purely content-addressable to prevent tampering.
- [Parameterless] The build output cannot be affected by user parameters other than the build entry point and the top-level source location.
- [Hermetic] All build steps, sources, and dependencies were fully declared up front with immutable references, and the build steps ran with no network access. All dependencies were fetched by the build service control plane and checked for integrity.
- [Reproducible] Re-running the build steps with identical input artifacts results in bit-for-bit identical output. (Builds that cannot meet this must provide a justification.)
[Provenance] Requirements for the artifact's provenance:
- [Available] Provenance is available to the consumer of the artifact, or to whomever is verifying the policy, and it identifies at least the artifact, the system that performed the build, and the top-level source. All artifact references are immutable, such as via a cryptographic hash.
- [Authenticated] Provenance's authenticity and integrity can be verified, such as through a digital signature.
- [Service Generated] Provenance is generated by the build service itself, as opposed to user-provided tooling running on top of the service.
- [Non-Falsifiable] Provenance cannot be falsified by the build service's users.
- [Dependencies Complete] Provenance records all build dependencies, meaning every artifact that was available to the build script. This includes the initial state of the machine, VM, or container of the build worker.
[Common] Common requirements for every trusted system involved in the supply chain (source, build, distribution, etc.):
- [Security] The system meets some TBD baseline security standard to prevent compromise. (Patching, vulnerability scanning, user isolation, transport security, secure boot, machine identity, etc. Perhaps NIST 800-53 or a subset thereof.)
- [Access] All physical and remote access must be rare, logged, and gated behind multi-party approval.
- [Superusers] Only a small number of platform admins may override the guarantees listed here. Doing so MUST require approval of a second platform admin.
SLSA is not transitive. It describes the integrity protections of an artifact's build process and top-level source, but nothing about the artifact's dependencies. Dependencies have their own SLSA ratings, and it is possible for a SLSA 4 artifact to be built from SLSA 0 dependencies.
The reason for non-transitivity is to make the problem tractable. If SLSA 4 required dependencies to be SLSA 4, then reaching SLSA 4 would require starting at the very beginning of the supply chain and working forward. This is backwards, forcing us to work on the least risky component first and blocking any progress further downstream. By making each artifact's SLSA rating independent from one another, it allows parallel progress and prioritization based on risk. (This is a lesson we learned when deploying other security controls at scale throughout Google.)
We expect SLSA ratings to be composed to describe a supply chain's overall security stance, as described in the vision below.
Let's consider how we might secure curlimages/curl from the motivating example using the SLSA framework.
Let's start by incrementally applying the SLSA principles to the final Docker image.
Initially the Docker image is SLSA 0. There is no provenance. It is difficult to determine who built the artifact and what sources and dependencies were used.
The diagram shows that the (mutable) locator curlimages/curl:7.72.0 points to
(immutable) artifact sha256:3c3ff….
We can reach SLSA 1 by scripting the build and generating
provenance. The build script was
already automated via make, so we use simple tooling to generate the
provenance on every release. Provenance records the output artifact hash, the
builder (in this case, our local machine), and the top-level source containing
the build script.
In the updated diagram, the provenance attestation says that the artifact
sha256:3c3ff… was built from
curl/curl-docker@d6525….
At SLSA 1, the provenance does not protect against tampering or forging but may be useful for vulnerability management.
To reach SLSA 2 (and later SLSA 3), we must switch to a hosted build service that generates provenance for us. This updated provenance should also include dependencies on a best-effort basis. SLSA 3 additionally requires the source and build platforms to implement additional security controls, which might need to be enabled.
In the updated diagram, the provenance now lists some dependencies, such as the
base image (alpine:3.11.5) and apk packages (e.g. curl-dev).
At SLSA 3, the provenance is significantly more trustworthy than before. Only highly skilled adversaries are likely able to forge it.
SLSA 4 requires two-party source control and hermetic builds. Hermeticity in particular guarantees that the dependencies are complete. Once these controls are enabled, the Docker image will be SLSA 4.
In the updated diagram, the provenance now attests to its hermeticity and
includes the cacert.pem dependency, which was absent before.
At SLSA 4, we have high confidence that the provenance is complete and trustworthy and that no single person can unilaterally change the top-level source.
We can recursively apply the same steps above to lock down dependencies. Each non-source dependency gets its own provenance, which in turns lists more dependencies, and so on.
The final diagram shows a subset of the graph, highlighting the path to the upstream source repository (curl/curl) and the certificate file (cacert.pem).
In reality, the graph is intractably large due to the fanout of dependencies. There will need to be some way to trim the graph to focus on the most important components. While this can reasonably be done by hand, we do not yet have a solid vision for how best to do this in an scalable, generic, automated way. One idea is to use ecosystem-specific heuristics. For example, Debian packages are built and organized in a very uniform way, which may allow Debian-specific heuristics.
An artifact's SLSA level is not transitive, so some aggregate measure of security risk across the whole supply chain is necessary. In other words, each node in our graph has its own, independent SLSA level. Just because an artifact's level is N does not imply anything about its dependencies' levels.
In our example, suppose that the final curlimages/curl Docker image were SLSA 4 but its curl-dev dependency were SLSA 0. Then this would imply a significant security risk: an adversary could potentially introduce malicious behavior into the final image by modifying the source code found in the curl-dev package. That said, even being able to identify that it has a SLSA 0 dependency has tremendous value because it can help focus efforts.
Formation of this aggregate risk measure is left for future work. It is perhaps too early to develop such a measure without real-world data. Once SLSA becomes more widely adopted, we expect patterns to emerge and the task to get a bit easier.
Accreditation and delegation will play a large role in the SLSA framework. It is not practical for every software consumer to fully vet every platform and fully walk the entire graph of every artifact. Auditors and/or accreditation bodies can verify and assert that a platform or vendor meets the SLSA requirements when configured in a certain way. Similarly, there may be some way to "trust" an artifact without analyzing its dependencies. This may be particularly valuable for closed source software.
We welcome all comments and suggestions for this document via GitHub issues, pull requests, email, or feedback form. Join the mailing list to follow the discussion and progress.
Issues that we must work out:
- Agree on the principles, terminology, and high-level strategy.
- Define a threat model describing specific threats we intend to address.
- Specify detailed requirements for Source, Build, Provenance, and Common to meet those principles.
- Agree on a leveling system.
- Document more end-to-end examples to show real threats and mitigations.
- Examples showing how to use common platforms to achieve SLSA (or an approximation) today.
In parallel to the SLSA specification, there is work to develop core formats and data models. Currently this is joint work between Binary Authorization and in-toto but we invite wider participation.
- Standard attestation format to express provenance and other attributes. This will allow sources and builders to express properties in a standard way that can be consumed by anyone. Also includes reference implementations for generating these attestations.
- Policy data model and reference implementation.
For a broader view of the software supply chain problem:
- Know, Prevent, Fix: A framework for shifting the discussion around vulnerabilities in open source
- Threats, Risks, and Mitigations in the Open Source Ecosystem
Prior iterations of the ideas presented here:
- Building Secure and Reliable Systems, Chapter 14: Deploying Code
- Binary Authorization for Borg - This is how Google implements the SLSA idea internally.
Other related work:
- CII Best Practices Badge
- Security Scorecards - Perhaps SLSA could be implemented as an aggregation of scorecard entries, for at least the checks that can be automated.
- Trustmarks
Other takes on provenance and CI/CD:
Footnotes
-
"Trusted person" is defined by the organization or developers that own/produce the software. A consumer must ultimately trust them to do the right thing. The non-unilateral principle protects against individuals within the organization subverting the organization's goals. ↩