What is Software Supply Chain Security?

Software supply chain security is the discipline of protecting every component, process, and system involved in building and delivering software, from source code and dependencies through build systems, registries, and production infrastructure. Software supply chain attacks accelerated rapidly, with over 454,000 new malicious packages published to open source repositories in 2025 alone. This is distinct from traditional application security because it focuses on everything your code depends on and everything that touches your code on its way to production.