jspolicy VS slsa

I struggled with understanding OPA too! I have not seen this mentioned, but one straightforward alternative is JSPolicy (https://www.jspolicy.com/), which allows you to write policies in Javascript or Typescript. It is really easy to understand and get started.

You will likely want to implement certain restrictions, limits, quotas, or security policies for your Kubernetes clusters. This could help with auditing or monitoring tasks, or with standardizing a quota for certain resources. Tools like the Open Policy Agent (OPA), jsPolicy, or Kyverno can be used based on your needs. Many developers are more comfortable with YAML or JavaScript, so Kyverno or jsPolicy might be preferred.

In 2021 we also released two new open source projects: vcluster, a tool for creating and using virtual Kubernetes clusters, and jsPolicy, a tool for writing policies for Kubernetes clusters in JavaScript or TypeScript. vcluster especially gained a lot of traction and our CEO Lukas Gentele gave a talk about it at KubeCon Los Angeles.

Either engine could be a good choice for your business. Consider which factors are most relevant to your project and your use case before you make a decision. You can learn more about jsPolicy here and about OPA here.

Loft Labs is the creator of several popular open-source projects in the cloud-native technology space, including the Kubernetes developer tool DevSpace, the certified Kubernetes distribution vcluster, and the policy engine jsPolicy. The company’s commercial product, Loft, enables any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes to hundreds or even thousands of engineers. Loft's customers span from fast-growing startups Gusto, Urbint, and HqO to well-established Fortune 500 companies that include one of the largest U.S. financial institutions and one of the world’s largest car manufacturers.

Loft Labs also recently released vcluster, a first-of-its-kind virtual cluster technology for Kubernetes. jsPolicy now available at www.jspolicy.com and on Github.

Would you mind explaining why is it hard for admission controllers to check container definitions of the pod? I've never used OPA or Kyverno, but I want to start contributing to a competitor project, so I am really curious to find out. Thank you! :)

This makes sense and I made the assumption that someone thought about the root-ability thing after I saw loft-sh/jspolicy.

Short answer: not where it counts.

My work focuses on recognizing known functions in obfuscated binaries, but there are some papers you might want to check out related to deobfuscation, if not necessarily using ML for deobfuscation or decompilation.

My take is that ML can soundly defeat the "easy" and more static obfuscation types (encodings, control flow flattening, splitting functions). It's low hanging fruit, and it's what I worked on most, but adoption is slow. On the other hand, "hard" obfuscations like virtualized functions or programs which embed JIT compilers to obfuscate at runtime... as far as I know, those are still unsolved problems.

This is a good overview of the subject, but pretty old and doesn't cover "hard" obfuscations: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1566145.

https://www.jinyier.me/papers/DATE19_Obf.pdf uses deobfuscation for RTL logic (FGPA/ASIC domain) with SAT solvers. Might be useful for a point of view from a fairly different domain.

https://advising.cs.arizona.edu/~debray/Publications/generic... uses "semantics-preserving transformations" to shed obfuscation. I think this approach is the way to go, especially when combined with dynamic/symbolic analysis to mitigate virt/jit types of transformations.

I'll mention this one as a cautionary tale: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2886012 has some good general info but glosses over the machine learning approach. It considers Hex-rays' FLIRT to be "machine learning", but FLIRT just hashes signatures, can be spoofed (i.e. https://siliconpr0n.org/uv/issues_with_flirt_aware_malware.p...), and is useless against obfuscation.

Eventually I think SBOM tools like Black Duck[1] and SLSA[2] will incorporate ML to improve the accuracy of even figuring out what dependencies a piece of software actually has.

[1]: https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/software-composi...

[2]: https://slsa.dev/

The dependency chain is certified! SLSA!

The things you mentioned are not solved by a typical "SBOM" but e.g. CycloneDX has extra fields to record provenance and pedigree and things like in-toto (https://in-toto.io/) or SLSA (https://slsa.dev/) also aim to work in this field.

I've spent the last six months in this field and people will tell you that this or that is an industry best practice or "a standard" but in my experience none of that is true. Everyone is still trying to figure out how best to protect the software supply chain security and things are still very much in flux.

It's multi-pronged and I imagine adopters may use a subset of features. Broadly, I think folks are going to be interested in a) branch/tag/reference protection rules, b) file protection rules (monorepo or otherwise, though monorepos do pose a very apt usecase for gittuf), and c) general key management for those who primarily care about Git signing.

For those who care about a and b, I think the work we want to do to support [in-toto attestations](https://github.com/in-toto/attestation) for [SLSA's upcoming source track](https://github.com/slsa-framework/slsa/issues/956) could be very interesting as well.

It doesn't have to be. Corporations which are FedRAMP[1] compliant, have to build software reproducibly in a fully isolated environment, only from reviewed code.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedRAMP

[2] https://slsa.dev/

SLSA stands for Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts, and it is a framework that aims to provide a set of best practices for the software supply chain, with a focus on OSS. It was created by Google, and it is now part of the OpenSSF. It consists of four levels of assurance, from Level 1 to Level 4, that correspond to different degrees of protection against supply chain attacks. Our CTO Paolo Mainardi mentioned SLSA in a very good article on software supply chain security, and we also mentioned it in another article about securing OCI Artifacts on Kubernetes.

SLSA.dev