Glossary

Software Provenance

What Is Software Provenance?

Software provenance is the documented and verifiable record of where a software component came from — its origin, authors, maintainers, organizations, build history, and the chain of custody from source to shipped artifact.

Provenance is what allows trust to be evaluated rather than assumed. Without provenance, every package is just a name and a version — indistinguishable from a malicious typosquat or a compromised release. With provenance, teams can map components to real maintainers and organizations, verify lineage, and make trust decisions based on evidence.

NetRise Provenance provides this capability for open-source components: mapping packages to canonical repositories, reconstructing lineage across ecosystems, and revealing origins, maintainers, and organizational context.

Software Supply Chain ConceptsVulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX)VEX is a standardized format for communicating whether a vulnerability in a software component is actually exploitable in a given product — filtering noise from risk.Read definition
Software Supply Chain ConceptsSoftware MaintainerA software maintainer is the individual or group responsible for an open-source project's code, releases, and direction — its stewardship over time.Read definition
Software Supply Chain ConceptsDirect DependencyA direct dependency is a software component an application explicitly declares in its own manifest or source — chosen by the developer, not pulled in downstream.Read definition

Software Provenance

What Is Software Provenance?

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