Google offers app to help companies assess their vendors' security

The Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire (VSAQ) is a Web-based application and was released under an open-source license on GitHub. It contains a collection of questionnaires that Google itself uses to review multiple aspects of a vendor's security.

The application has templates for Web application security, infrastructure security, physical and data center security and an organization's overall security and privacy program. The questions cover everything from whether the vendor has processes in place for external researchers to report vulnerabilities to HTTPS implementation details and internal data handling policies.

Depending on the answers provided, the application will provide tips and recommendations to help the reviewed organization address issues that can pose a security risk.

According to Google security engineers Lukas Weichselbaum and Daniel Fabian, many of the vendors that were assessed using the questionnaires found the tips useful and were interested in using the app themselves to assess their own suppliers. This played into Google's decision to make it public.

"We hope it will help companies spin up, or further improve their own vendor security programs," Weichselbaum and Fabian said in a blog post. "We also hope the base questionnaires can serve as a self-assessment tool for security-conscious companies and developers looking to improve their security posture."

The four available templates can easily be expanded to include additional questions tailored to each organization's security needs and expectations.

Supply-chain security, especially as it relates to software, has become a serious problem for companies in recent years. Third-party code accounts for the majority of any organization's software and according to security vendor Veracode, 90 percent of that code is not compliant with known security standards like the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Top 10.

Many software developers themselves use third-party components and then fail to track and import patches for vulnerabilities found in them. OWASP lists vulnerable software components as a widespread and difficult to detect issue.