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 continue to rise, and organizations are under intense pressure to build trust in both the code they create and the open-source software (OSS) they consume.

To address this growing challenge, many teams are turning to the 

Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework (S2C2F)

 designed to strengthen how organizations ingest, validate, and govern open-source components.

This blog is the second part of our Supply Chain Integrity Series. If you haven’t read the first article yet, check out:

Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework

. It is a security model created to help organizations safely adopt open-source software by improving 

, integrity, and governance across the entire consumption lifecycle.

 side, how teams ingest, validate, scan, store, and trust OSS before it becomes part of their build pipeline.

 development lifecycle, S2C2F gives teams a clear, maturity-based path to reduce 

Why S2C2F matters for open source security?

Modern software is overwhelmingly built on open source. However, the speed and flexibility of OSS come with significant risks. Without a framework like S2C2F, teams are vulnerable to:

S2C2F helps teams systematically reduce these risks by defining the controls required at each maturity level, starting with simple ingestion hygiene and moving all the way to full hermetic, zero-trust infrastructure. It supports 

How S2C2F works: A maturity-based path to integrity

The framework defines four maturity levels. You don’t need to jump to Level 4 immediately; 

 is designed to support incremental adoption as your organization grows.

Level 1: Ingestion control (The Baseline)

 Stop pulling directly from public registries.

 Protection against removal events, registry outages, and basic dependency integrity issues. You also gain a foundational inventory of all OSS components.

Level 2: Secure consumption & faster MTTR

 Prevent packages with known vulnerabilities from entering the build loop and eliminate manual CVE checking.

Audit that consumption is through the approved ingestion method.

Level 3: Malware defense & Zero-day detection

 Defend against malicious actors and typo-squatting.

 becomes proactive. You are protected from dependency confusion and advanced attacks.

Proactive reviews for yet-undiscovered vulnerabilities.

Verify that binaries match the trusted source code.

 Total independence and hermetic security.

 Maximum integrity–even from compromised public upstreams.

How Cloudsmith helps you achieve supply chain integrity

Implementing S2C2F manually is a significant operational challenge. 

 designed specifically to automate software supply chain integrity.

Our platform aligns with S2C2F principles, allowing you to move from Maturity Level 1 to Level 3 almost immediately.

Cloudsmith doesn’t just support S2C2F; it accelerates it, turning 

Software supply chain best practices inspired by S2C2F

To secure the open-source consumption lifecycle, teams should adopt these 

Enforce automated vulnerability and malware scanning

 rather than pulling directly from the wild.

 to ensure code comes from where it claims to.

Rebuild sensitive or high-risk dependencies

S2C2F offers a clear, practical roadmap for improving 

, and strengthening integrity, without overwhelming your team with complex controls from day one.

Whether you're starting at Level 1 or aiming for Level 4, frameworks like S2C2F help organizations adopt open source more safely and confidently.

1. How does S2C2F improve software security?

By enforcing ingestion hygiene, vulnerability scanning, malware defense, and provenance validation, S2C2F reduces the entry points attackers use to infiltrate supply chains.

2. Why does S2C2F matter for open source?

Most software today is open source. S2C2F provides a structured way to safely consume OSS at scale, lowering dependency risks without slowing development.

3. What are the S2C2F steps for securing OSS projects?

Ingest securely → Validate → Scan → Enforce → Audit → Rebuild (when needed).

4. Which frameworks secure software supply chains?

, NIST SSDF, SLSA, CIS guidelines, and SPDX/OSV for standardization.

5. How do you reduce OSS supply chain risk?

You can reduce risk by using private registries, validating provenance, enforcing policies, keeping SBOMs, and scanning for malware and vulnerabilities proactively.

6. What are the guidelines for secure OSS consumption?

Consume through a private proxy, validate integrity, scan frequently, enforce policies, and maintain SBOMs for transparency.

Parul Jhawar

Marketing

Security Maturity Assessment Guide

Understanding S2C2F: How it strengthens OSS security

Software today is built on an ever-expanding mesh of open-source components, third-party libraries, container images, package registries, automated systems, and build services. While this ecosystem accelerates development, it introduces a terrifying reality: a single compromised dependency or an unexpected upstream change can ripple through your entire product stack in minutes.

It has become one of the most critical pillars of modern DevSecOps. When your dependencies are trustworthy, verifiable, and governed correctly, you reduce the risk of malware insertion, dependency confusion, tampering, or upstream failure. Without this foundation, even the strongest supply chain security controls at the application layer won’t matter.

This blog, the first in Cloudsmith’s new series on 

, breaks down what software supply chain integrity actually means, why maintaining it is so challenging, and how frameworks like 

S2C2F (Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework)

 help organisations implement consistent, secure open-source consumption practices.

Ready to understand where your supply chain security stands? Take our 

Software Supply Chain Maturity Assessment

 refers to the ability to ensure that every component in your software, from source code to dependencies to build artifacts and containers, remains authentic, untampered, verified, and sourced from trusted origins.

Do we fully trust the software we’re using?

Are we confident it hasn’t been altered, compromised, or replaced?

It goes beyond traditional application security. While AppSec focuses on your code, integrity focuses on the 

Where did this software originate? Can we verify the source?

Was it built by who it claims to be built by?

Has anything been modified, injected, or tampered with?

How do we enforce policies around what can (and cannot) enter our supply chain?

Can we rely on the upstream source, or do we have a trustworthy internal copy?

As organizations scale, maintaining this integrity moves from "nice to have" to "mission-critical."

Why supply chain integrity is challenging today?

Modern engineering teams consume thousands of open-source packages and containers from public ecosystems like npm, PyPi, Maven, and Docker Hub. These communities evolve fast, and threat actors have learned to weaponize that speed.

The "trust but verify" model is dead. We are now in a "verify, then trust" era. Here is why the landscape has shifted:

1. Malicious package uploads / Typosquatting

Attackers publish packages with names similar to legitimate ones (e.g., reqeust instead of request) to trick developers or automated tools into installing them. Once installed, these packages often run "post-install" scripts that exfiltrate environment variables or keys.

If you use an internal package name (e.g., my-company-auth) that isn't registered publicly, attackers can register that name on a public registry with a higher version number. By default, many package managers will pull the "latest" version -tricking your build system into downloading the attacker's public malware instead of your private code.

If an open-source maintainer’s credentials are stolen, attackers can modify widely-used packages, injecting backdoors, data exfiltration, or crypto-mining code into thousands of downstream applications instantly.

4. Upstream removal or "Left-Pad" incidents

It’s not always malice; sometimes it’s chaos. A popular OSS package can be unpublished by its author (like the infamous left-pad incident), breaking builds across the globe. If you rely on public registries directly, your pipeline is at the mercy of their uptime.

Malware embedded inside base images, compressed binary artifacts, or build scripts can spread downstream silently and undetected.

This modern threat landscape requires a shift in thinking. It’s not just about using open source securely; it’s about maintaining centralized ingestion, policy enforcement, provenance checks, and continuous monitoring

The pillars of software supply chain integrity

To help teams build strong governance around software dependencies, several core integrity principles have emerged. These align closely with industry standards, such as SLSA (Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts) and S2C2F.

Software supply chain integrity relies on a set of proven pillars that help teams control how software is sourced, validated, stored, and consumed. These include:

Never pull directly from the public internet in production builds. Consume OSS and third-party software through a centralized "front door", an artifact repository controlled by your organization. This acts as a firewall for your code, preventing accidental consumption of malicious packages and shielding you from upstream outages.

You cannot secure what you cannot see. A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) provides a clear inventory of all dependencies, versions, and transitive packages. It's critical for identifying risky components and responding quickly to new vulnerabilities.

Automate detection at the gate. Scanning must happen 

 a package enters your environment. This includes checking for:

Known CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)

 standards. Establish global rules for approved packages, permitted licenses, vulnerability thresholds, and immutability. Governance ensures that developers in Team A and Team B are subject to the same safety standards and regulations.

Verify the origin. Ensuring your binaries match their source code is essential. Provenance checks confirm who built the software, where it was built, what tools were used, and whether the artifact signature matches the builder's key.

To achieve maximal integrity, organizations rebuild OSS packages inside their own trusted environment, signing them and generating SBOMs for each build.

Introducing S2C2F: A framework for supply chain integrity

One of the most practical and widely adopted frameworks for implementing software supply chain integrity is the Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework (S2C2F).

Originally created by Microsoft in 2019 to secure their massive internal development loops, it was donated to the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) in 2022. It now serves as the industry standard for how organizations should 

 open-source software (as opposed to SLSA, which focuses on how you 

S2C2F offers eight core principles and four maturity levels to help organizations enhance their approach to consuming open-source software.

 All external artifacts must come through a central, controlled location.

 You must maintain a complete list of all OSS components you use.

 Vulnerabilities must be patched within a defined SLA.

 Developers must be prevented from bypassing secure methods technically.

 You must log and audit all ingestion sources and changes that occur.

 Automated scanning for CVEs and malware is mandatory.

 For high security, rebuild OSS on a trusted infrastructure.

 If a patch isn't available, fork and fix it yourself temporarily.

To keep this focused, we’ll dive deeper into S2C2F, including maturity levels and practical implementation steps, in Part 2 of this series.

1. What is software supply chain integrity?

Software supply chain integrity is the practice of ensuring that every component in your software development lifecycle—dependencies, containers, build artifacts, and scripts—is authentic, verified, tamper-free, and sourced from trusted origins. It answers the question: "Is this code exactly what it claims to be?"

2. Why is software supply chain integrity important?

Modern software relies heavily on third-party and open-source components that can be compromised, removed, or tampered with. Integrity prevents attacks such as dependency confusion, malware injection, and supply chain compromise.

3. What is the difference between SLSA and S2C2F? 

Think of them as two sides of the same coin. SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts) focuses on securing the 

 process (how you create software). S2C2F (Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework) focuses on the 

 process (how you consume open-source software). You need both for a complete software supply chain security strategy.

4. How does Cloudsmith prevent dependency confusion attacks?

The most effective way is to use a private artifact repository (like Cloudsmith) that supports "upstream proxying" with namespace protection. This ensures that if an internal package name exists, the build system will never look for it on the public registry, preventing the injection of malicious public packages.

5. How does Cloudsmith support supply chain integrity?

Cloudsmith acts as a secure "supply chain firewall." It allows organizations to centralize OSS ingestion, automatically scan for malware and vulnerabilities, manage SBOMs, enforce license policies, and verify provenance—automating the requirements of frameworks like S2C2F.

What is Software Supply Chain Integrity?

The rise of software supply chain attacks isn’t slowing down. While many developers are familiar with typosquatting, a new, AI-driven threat has emerged: slopsquatting (also known as "phantom dependencies"). Last week, Cloudsmith hosted a webinar unpacking the mechanics of these attacks, their real-world impact, and the practical ways engineering teams can defend their development pipelines.

If you missed the live webinar, don’t worry; here’s a recap of the biggest insights, examples of attacks, and expert perspectives shared by our speakers, 

Nigel Douglas (Head of Developer Relations)

What is causing the increased threat from Typosquatting?

Typosquatting has been around for years, but attacks are now increasing rapidly thanks to:

developers relying more on autogenerated code

the ease of publishing look-alike packages in public repositories

As Claire Speedy (Senior Growth Marketing Manager) framed it during the opening:

“These threats are everywhere. If you're shipping software, you can’t afford to ignore them.”

This session explored not just how these attacks occur, but how open-source data sources, security tooling, and artifact management workflows can be used to stop them before they ever reach production.

Understanding typosquatting and slopsquatting attacks

Typosquatting is a cyberattack where malicious actors register package names that are slight misspellings or variations of legitimate ones. The goal is to trick users into installing a deceptive, malicious package.

Visual lookalikes (Character Swaps, misspellings, or reordering):

Attackers register names that look nearly identical to popular packages, relying on cognitive shortcuts. Users,and increasingly AI agents, glance at the text and "autocorrect" the error in their minds.

 Swapping characters, omitting letters, or using "homoglyphs" (characters that look alike).

matplotltib (pretending to be Python's matplotlib)

reqeust (classic persistence, still actively blocked daily)

Soundsquatting (Sound-alike or pronunciation-based variants)

This tactic targets developers who learn package names verbally (e.g., from podcasts, team calls, or YouTube tutorials) or use voice-to-text tools. The package name is spelled differently but sounds identical to the legitimate one.

 Using homophones (words that sound the same) to bypass mental spelling checks.

colors vs colours (exploiting regional spelling differences)

snyk vs snick (phonetic variations of branded tools)

Instead of misspelling a name, attackers append "trust signals" -words like "-official", "-security", or "-plugin" to a legitimate brand name. This tricks developers (and AI models) into believing the package is an official extension of a trusted library.

lodash-js or lodash-plugin (mimicking extensions to lodash)

discord-dev (mimicking official Discord developer tools)

noblox.js-proxy (mimicking the popular noblox.js wrapper)

2. Real-world example: A typosquatted PyPI package

Nigel demonstrated a live example using the OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities) API, querying a malicious PyPI package called 

, a near-match for the legitimate requests library.

“A typosquat on a popular package… delivering a crypto-miner payload.”

Even if PyPI removes the malicious package hours later, it might still be cached in an internal artifact store or build environment, making retrospective scanning essential.

3. Why this problem exists: The “Wild West” of package ecosystems

Public upstreams like PyPI, npm, and crates.io are intentionally open and permissive - great for innovation, but also beneficial for attackers.New packages are uploaded daily. Manual vetting is almost impossible. That allows malicious typo-squatted packages to accumulate downloads before maintainers can detect and disable them.

Example: a typo-squatted npm package that sat unnoticed for 

 and still collected hundreds of downloads.This is exactly why organizations need to pull dependencies into a controlled platform like 

 instead of sourcing them directly from public registries; it provides an opportunity to scan, quarantine, and validate packages before they reach your developers or pipelines.

4. Introduction to Slopsquatting: The new AI threat

Slopsquatting is the modern evolution of this threat, driven by Generative AI. It occurs when Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate plausible-sounding package names that don't actually exist.

Attackers scan these LLM outputs to find "phantom dependencies" - packages that ChatGPT or Copilot 

 exist but don’t. The attackers then register these names on public registries like npm or PyPI.

"AI tools hallucinate nonexistent packages. Attackers register them. Developers copy-paste the code and accidentally install them. It’s a perfect exploitation chain."

 - Liana Ertz, Product Manager at Cloudsmith

Recent research (AI Incident Database) indicates that 

of hallucinated package names in Python and npm were converted into actual malicious uploads in 2023.

In 2024, hallucination rates for package names still range from 

5. Developer behaviour is increasing the risk

Many developers said the majority of their code is AI-generated, and much of it is pushed to production with fewer peer reviews than ever before.

Nigel described this pattern as - he rise of vibe-coding, generating code, trusting it, and shipping it without the right checks. Combined with slopsquatting, this creates a perfect storm for open-source malware infiltration.

6. How Cloudsmith helps detect & block malicious packages

Today, Cloudsmith integrates directly with the OSV data feed to automatically:

Enrich packages with vulnerability & malware context

Provide package insights, provenance, and trust signals

Nigel demonstrated Cloudsmith’s policy engine in action:

A malicious package was uploaded → OPA policy detected OSV’s MAL- identifier → the package was 

This happens before it reaches your developers or build systems.

Liana also shared what’s coming next:We're ingesting more provenance metadata, publish dates, download activity, maintainers, to help identify high-risk packages early. We're also exploring MCP and upstream trust features to prevent dependency confusion.”

 AI hallucinations are creating "phantom dependencies" that attackers are actively exploiting.

 It's no longer just about misspellings; it's about confusing the developer 

 You cannot manually vet every npm or PyPI package. You need policy engines that block bad artifacts at the door.

 By ensuring only trusted, verifiable artifacts reach your pipeline, you neutralize the risk of "vibe-coding" errors.

If you couldn’t join the live session, here are the highlights you missed:

Real demonstrations of malicious PyPI packages

Examples of AI hallucinating dangerous package names

Research on developer behavior and AI reliance

A walkthrough of Cloudsmith’s quarantine + policy engine

Q&A covering provenance, signatures, SLSA, and more

Slopsquatting and Typosquatting: How to Detect AI-Hallucinated Malicious Packages

In recent years, the software supply chain has become a prime target for attackers. From dependency vulnerabilities to third-party risks in DevOps, organizations face mounting challenges to keep their software secure and uncompromised. Traditional security models no longer hold up. Adversaries are exploiting every stage of the pipeline, from code through deployment.

This is why the role that DevOps teams play in security has become more significant than ever. Speed and agility are no longer the only concerns for DevOps; it is now resilience and trust with risk management. Organizations can keep ahead of threats by ensuring that security is incorporated in all stages of the development and delivery lifecycle, and minimize their exposure to software supply chain threats.

The guide gives a simple, high-level overview of how supply chain security in DevOps operates, challenges that organizations face, and what strategies organizations can adopt to reduce risks. This complete guide comes with a 101 explanation of how DevOps enhances security in your organization.

A software supply chain risk is any weakness, vulnerability, or exposure that gets into your system via the components, tools, and processes of building and delivering software. Since modern applications are dependent on countless third-party libraries, external services, and automated pipelines, organizations face the risks associated therewith.

The majority of applications rely on open-source libraries and frameworks. In case such dependencies have unpatched vulnerabilities, attackers would use them for access.

Vendors, contractors, and external integrations can accidentally place insecure code, improper configurations, or malicious programs into the environment.

Build and deployment pipelines are prime targets. Once attackers gain access, they can insert malicious code or modify software before it goes into production.

Cloudsmith Blog

Understanding S2C2F: How it strengthens OSS security

What is Software Supply Chain Integrity?

Slopsquatting and Typosquatting: How to Detect AI-Hallucinated Malicious Packages

The DevOps Guide to Mitigating Software Supply Chain Risks

The true cost of legacy artifact management

7 Ways Cloud-Native Improves Artifact Management Scalability and Performance

Choosing the Right Artifact Management Platform for Enterprise Scale

Cloud Native Vs. On-Premise Artifact Management - A Complete Overview

Artifact Management: A Complete Guide