Poisoned Pipeline / Guidance
Guidance
Defender documents (OWASP, NIST SSDF, SLSA, CISA) describe controls. This catalogue describes attacker techniques. This page records where a control had no matching technique, and what we added.
Why a technique can exist with zero incidents.
Some techniques come from pentest findings and published research, the same way
other catalogues list a technique before a public victim write-up exists.
Dim cells on the matrix are identified from literature (24 right now).
Bright cells are observed in a mapped incident. That is not a claim the unused
ones are fake. We have not yet attached a named public case.
Documents reviewed
OWASP Top 10 CI/CD Security Risks
OWASP (originated as Cider Security / OxSecurity research)
- T0207 CICD-SEC-9 Improper Artifact Integrity Validation was only a mitigation (M1200) without an attacker technique for skipping or forging integrity checks.
- CICD-SEC-10 Insufficient logging is modeled as T0144/T0146 (misconfigured logs) but those still lack named public incidents in this corpus.
NIST SP 800-218 SSDF
NIST
- T0206 PS.3.2 collect and share provenance for all components of software releases. This catalogue had no technique for omitting or forging that provenance.
SLSA Threats and mitigations
OpenSSF / SLSA
- T0206 SLSA build threats E/F (forge provenance, unofficial source) were only implied by T0191/T0197.
- T0208 Signed-but-malicious artifacts (producer key used on attacker output) were not named. SolarWinds is the canonical case.
OxSecurity / Cider CI/CD Top 10 and research
Cider Security (now OxSecurity)
- Most techniques in this set were identified in this research first (PPE, PBAC, credential hygiene, 3rd-party services), then published as OWASP. Unused techniques are often this research, not missing incidents.
CISA Secure Software Development / EO 14028 artifacts
CISA
- T0206 Attestation and provenance requirements assume producers emit truthful SBOMs; forging that paperwork is an attacker technique this catalogue did not name.
NIST SP 800-161r1 Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management
NIST
- 800-161 is organizational C-SCRM (suppliers, contracts, hardware). This catalogue stays on attacker techniques in software delivery. No extra T-items added; out of tactical scope.
S2C2F — Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework
OpenSSF (Microsoft-led; Adrian Diglio, Jay White)
- S2C2F's threat table lists 13 OSS-consumption threats. Twelve map to incidents this catalogue already carries (CCleaner for build compromise, ua-parser-js for registry-account takeover, eslint/event-stream for repo and dependency compromise, typosquats, dependency confusion, node-ipc for license-change sabotage). Three classes have no observed incident here — post-build tampering of a distributed artifact, upstream takedown breaking builds (left-pad), and end-of-life components (log4net) — and all three are availability/supply risks, not attacker techniques. The framework is consumption-side controls (ingest, scan, inventory, update, audit, enforce, rebuild, fix), the defender mirror of what the technique set already describes. No new attacker techniques added.
MITRE Supply Chain Attack Framework and Attack Patterns (MTR140021)
MITRE Corporation for DASD SE (John F. Miller, Dec 2013)
- 41 attack patterns (A1-A41) covering malicious insertion of HW, SW, FW and system data across the DoD acquisition lifecycle. About two thirds are hardware counterfeiting, ASIC/firmware substitution and shipping-channel interception - out of scope for a software-delivery corpus. The software patterns largely duplicate techniques already present: A37/A39/A40 (altered compilers and dev tools) map to T0170, A39 (IDE/tooling) to T0154, A20 (malicious update) to the update-channel family. Two classes have no corpus counterpart and were left as gaps rather than invented: insider-directed design/requirements tampering (A13-A17, altering specifications so faults are built in) and deliberately misconfiguring build data (A30). Neither has a public software-supply-chain incident in this catalogue's sources.
Software Supply Chain Attacks - lifecycle casebook (2021)
Public-domain briefing PDF, dated March 2021 (sources: DHS CERT, FBI, MITRE ATT&CK, vendor research)
- A ten-case lifecycle map (design, develop, deploy, maintain, retire) plus integrity and attribution notes. Five of the ten cases had no story here and were added from the cited primary research: SignSight / VGCA installer substitution (AS323), Operation StealthyTrident on Able Desktop (AS324), AppleJeus counterfeit trading applications (AS325), GoldenSpy bank-mandated tax software (AS326) and WIZVERA VeraPort (AS327). The other five were already covered: SolarWinds, NotPetya, ShadowHammer, Copay/event-stream and dependency confusion. The document's retire-stage point (end-of-life software increasing exposure) is a supply risk with no attacker-technique counterpart, consistent with the S2C2F review.
Developing Incident Response and Management with your Supply Chain
NCSC ICS Community of Interest Supply Chain Expert Group (Colin Topping, July 2023)
- Process-side guidance, not attacker techniques, so no T-items. It exposed a real gap in the mitigation set: all 123 existing mitigations were technical or platform-side, and none covered living with a supplier compromise. Added M1932 (contractual incident-notification clause with template, SLA and reciprocal disclosure terms), M1933 (supplier-specific incident playbook holding risk profile, stakeholders, standing connection inventory and the question set), M1934 (named and tested fallback route per critical supplier service, including manual operation and reconciliation). M1932/M1933 attached to T0112, T0209, T0205, T0109 and T0135; M1934 kept unattached because the technique set is attacker-behaviour only and has no availability element. Also newly surfaced: /mitigations/ now renders every mitigation record with the techniques that reference it — previously the count had no destination page.