Chainguard Libraries Overview

Chainguard Libraries provide enhanced security for open source dependencies in the Java, JavaScript, and Python ecosystems, addressing critical supply chain vulnerabilities through automated patching and continuous monitoring. Modern applications rely heavily on libraries from public repositories like Maven Central, npm Registry, and PyPI, but these dependencies often contain vulnerabilities that put applications at risk.

Background

Open source libraries distributed through public repositories face several security challenges: maintainers may not promptly address vulnerabilities, binary artifacts can be compromised, and the sheer volume of transitive dependencies makes manual security management impractical. While these repositories enable rapid development, they also introduce supply chain risks that traditional security approaches struggle to address.

While convenient, these services remove the direct link from your application to the source code of a specific project, and create a potential risk for quality issues with the artifacts, man-in-the-middle attacks, removal or override of libraries with vulnerable or malicious versions, and other issues. The Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) specification describes these risks and how to protect your software against them.

Although this is a common way of accessing open source binaries, it requires you to put tremendous trust into the following aspects for the dozen or even hundreds of open source libraries you typically use for each application:

• Maintainers and especially release managers of the projects
• Local workstation or CI setup used for the release build
• Release process mechanisms to create the binaries
• Transport of the binaries from the build system to the public repositories
• Management of access to the repositories
• Monitoring of repositories for attacks as well as harmful or malicious binaries
• Traffic to public repositories and attacks on the transport to your infrastructure

There are no real guarantees as to the actual provenance of the software code. Repositories also vary greatly in quality and there is no guarantee that the upstream source of a project is available in a repository. In addition, these repositories also hold non-open source binaries of libraries.

All these factors create uncertainty. Using these public repositories can feel as opaque as picking up a USB drive off of the sidewalk and plugging it into your laptop.

Introduction

Chainguard Libraries builds all available libraries from source code in the Chainguard Factory and makes them available for you. The Chainguard Factory is Chainguard’s internal tooling that enables a more secure, dedicated, private, and SLSA-certified build infrastructure for building software from source and publishing the binaries to customers.

Chainguard Libraries and the use of the Chainguard Factory remove many software supply chain problems for libraries:

• All binary libraries and library versions are built within the trusted Chainguard infrastructure directly from the source code of the official project.
• Binaries are handled and managed only by Chainguard and made exclusively available for your consumption.
• Any supply chain attacks at build and distribution are eliminated, since all steps from the source to your use are handled by Chainguard.
• If there is no open source code available, no binaries are made available by Chainguard. This eliminates any license-related risks from commercial libraries. The policy and process to have no binaries without source also removes the danger from malicious artifacts, since these artifacts do not provide source code in public code repositories.

Chainguard Libraries is available for the following library ecosystems:

• Java and the larger Java Virtual Machine (JVM) ecosystem with Chainguard Libraries for Java
• JavaScript and the larger ecosystem around JavaScript, TypeScript, npm, React, and others with Chainguard Libraries for JavaScript
• Python and the larger ecosystem with Chainguard Libraries for Python

Other Resources

• Chainguard Libraries product page
• Learning Lab for June 2025 on Chainguard Libraries for Python
• Learning Lab for May 2025 about Chainguard Libraries for Java

Blog posts

• Mitigating Malware in the npm Ecosystem with Chainguard Libraries
• Announcing Chainguard Libraries for JavaScript: Malware-Resistant Dependencies Built Securely from Source
• Registries and the npm Breach: Securing the Weakest Link in the Software Supply Chain
• Malware-Resistant Python without the Guesswork
• This Shit is Hard: Java Archeology at a Massive Scale
• Mitigating Malware in the Python Ecosystem with Chainguard Libraries
• Announcing Chainguard Libraries for Python: Malware-Resistant Dependencies Built Securely from Source
• Announcing Chainguard Libraries: Guarded Java Language Dependencies Built from Source