---
title: "Cloudsmith + Athena: Software Supply Chain Security"
description: "Cloudsmith joins Chainguard's Athena coalition as a mitigation partner, closing the gap between AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery and exploitation."
canonical_url: "https://cloudsmith.com/partners/athena"
last_updated: "2026-09-28T17:18:41Z"
---
# Cloudsmith + Athena: Software Supply Chain Security

## Protecting the software supply chain with Athena

AI models find vulnerabilities in open source software faster than  disclosure processes can handle. It used to be months or years between vulnerability discovery and exploit; now it's hours or days. Exploits get weaponized before any public disclosure. Athena closes the gap.

Members of the coalition, including Cloudsmith, work together to share vulnerability findings and then get fixes and mitigations out fast.

## Cloudsmith and Athena deliver a more secure software supply chain

### A safer Cloudsmith platform

Cloudsmith gets access to Athena's pre-disclosure vulnerability feed, so we can patch and harden our own platform before an exploit is public.

### Safer dependencies

We enrich our dependency data with exploitation signals from every Athena partner, so the "safe" package recommendations we surface to developers, AI agents, and pipelines benefit from this feed.

### A safer ecosystem

We send our own observed exploitation data back into Athena, to help other partners.

We built Athena because orchestrated defense is the only thing that keeps pace with AI-powered attacks. No single defender can cover the entire open source ecosystem alone. ** As a mitigation partner, Cloudsmith will play a vital role by delivering artifacts to developers and pipelines, bringing a uniquely valuable contribution to Athena.**

## Frequently asked questions

### What is the Athena coalition?

Athena is an industry coalition, launched by Chainguard, that pools vulnerability findings from member organizations across the software industry and turns them into fixes and mitigations before attackers can exploit them.

### Why does closing the gap between discovery and exploitation matter now?

Many of the vulnerabilities AI models surface are what Chainguard calls silent vulnerabilities: bugs a maintainer already fixed, sometimes years ago, that never got a CVE and never triggered a scanner alert. AI models can find these faster than the industry's disclosure and patching processes were built to handle, and exploits can now be weaponized within hours or days of discovery, sometimes before a fix even exists.

### What is Cloudsmith's role in Athena?

Cloudsmith is a mitigation partner in Athena. We get access to the coalition's pre-disclosure vulnerability feed to patch and harden our own platform before exploits go public. We enrich our dependency data with exploitation signals so the safe packages we surface to developers, AI agents, and pipelines reflect real-world risk. We send our own observed exploitation data back into Athena to help other partners respond faster. This is one part of a broader relationship: Cloudsmith customers can also proxy and cache Chainguard's hardened containers and libraries directly through Cloudsmith.

### What has Athena disclosed so far?

Athena's first disclosure covered 14 previously silent vulnerabilities in Java projects: one critical, one high, eight medium, and four low severity, none of them live zero-days. For each one, Chainguard published the patch, published a free public advisory, and shipped a remediated artifact.

### Does Cloudsmith's relationship with Chainguard go beyond Athena?

Yes. Cloudsmith customers can proxy and cache Chainguard Containers and Chainguard Libraries directly through Cloudsmith. That makes hardened, low-to-no-CVE images and dependencies the default source for builds and pipelines, with Cloudsmith's policy enforcement and consumption traceability layered on top.

[Explore the Chainguard containers integration](https://cloudsmith.com/product/integrations/chainguard-containers)

[Read the Chainguard containers integration docs](https://docs.cloudsmith.com/integrations/integrating-with-chainguard-containers)

## See how Cloudsmith can help protect your software supply chain

[Book a demo](/book-a-demo)