Cloudsmith provides a control plane at the registry layer, enforcing policies against any ingested artifact to bolster your security posture. Here, we dig into the mechanics of the specific Cloudsmith capabilities that make enforcement at the registry work, and what makes each one meaningfully different from what you can do with a CI gate or a standalone scanner.
Policy management: Write policy against a breadth of risk signals
Policy management is built on Open Policy Agent (OPA) and uses Rego as its written language. In Cloudsmith, the power of policy management comes from what you can write policy against.
Other enforcement approaches often rely on blunt, binary policies. This lack of granularity can result in blocking approved packages, which creates noise and disrupts developer workflows. For example, a binary control may block a package with a CVE score that exceeds a threshold. But CVE is only one of many potential threat signals. CVE severity tells you how bad a vulnerability could be. It doesn’t say anything about the likelihood of exploitability. Policy management lets you combine severity with EPSS scores. A package with a critical CVE with a 0.1% EPSS score and a package with a medium CVE currently being actively exploited are not equivalent risks, and your policies don't have to treat them as if they are.
Beyond vulnerability data, policies can evaluate against license type, upstream publish date, package age, custom metadata, and, for Docker images, SBOM contents. That constitutes a much broader range of signals for security teams to use when deciding whether a dependency belongs in their environment. Cloudsmith makes all that data available as policy inputs.
To aid with set-up, provide pre-configured policy templates covering the most common enforcement scenarios. Users can edit and amend these policies as their needs evolve. Legacy artifact management tools that claim similar policy-as-code capabilities added it by way of acquisition. This kind of bolt-on solution often forces users to manage admin configurations in multiple places. Cloudsmith policy management is native to the platform with all controls and options under the “Policies” tab. These policies also apply across Cloudsmith’s multi-format repos, so you can write a policy once and apply it globally.
It’s impossible to predict what packages attackers will target next. So, when a new supply chain attack occurs against a package you depend on, what do you do in the window between when the attack begins and a CVE surfaces? That’s the most dangerous time because you may pull a compromised package without realizing it. Without a cooldown policy, that package enters your environment unchecked.
Cooldown policies address zero-day threats by hiding newly published packages from the index for a configurable period (e.g., 3-7 days). Threat researchers typically identify and report malicious packages within the first few hours or days after publication. The cooldown window provides a default buffer for threat researchers to catch up. If no advisory emerges during the cooldown window, the package releases into your environment once it ends. For security-focused teams managing active CVE incidents, this is one of the more operationally specific controls in the feature set; it targets the exposure window directly, rather than just blocking on severity at a static point in time.
Continuous risk detection: Enforcement that reflects current threat data
Vulnerabilities can go undetected for years after a package is published, or a dependency that was clean on Monday may have a critical CVE attached to it by Thursday. Regardless of how long a package has been in your private repository, you need a way to check it against current threat data.
Cloudsmith addresses this through continuous risk detection. Rather than rescanning packages on a schedule, Cloudsmith extracts metadata from each package at sync time and continuously matches it against OSV.dev. When a new CVE, EPSS update, or malicious package record lands in the feed, and Cloudsmith finds a match with a package in your registry, this triggers your policies to re-evaluate the package and take the associated action, e.g., quarantine.
OSV.dev draws on a wide range of data sources, including NVD, GitHub Security Advisories, ecosystem-specific databases like PyPI and RubyGems, and malicious package records covering npm, NuGet, PyPI, and RubyGems, among others. EPSS scores are embedded directly, making them available as policy inputs without any additional integration work.
The result is policies that evaluate against a live view of current threat data, not whatever the feed showed when the package first arrived.
Decision logs: Enforcement you can prove
Every policy evaluation Cloudsmith runs produces a decision log entry: what triggered, what data informed the decision, what action the policy took, and why.
In a compliance review, e.g., SOC 2 Type II, DORA, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, or CRA, log data is the evidence that your controls are real and operating as specified. In an incident response scenario, it’s the audit trail that tells you what was in your environment and what your policies did about it.
Decision logs are queryable via API, which means they integrate into whatever reporting or observability tooling your team already uses.
Why these capabilities reinforce each other
These capabilities cascade into and connect with each other. Continuous risk detection updates the risk profile that policy management evaluates against. Policy evaluations, including cooldown windows, produce decision log entries. Decision logs close the audit gap that makes enforcement defensible in a compliance review.
Cloudsmith delivers a continuous control plane for safely consuming open source dependencies. That's the structural difference between a security program built on Cloudsmith’s security features and one that relies on point-in-time scanning and downstream pipeline gates.
Talk to us about what security enforcement looks like for your environment.
