Open Source Security Management Is Missing a Pillar: It's Time to Talk About EOL

Open source security management has matured significantly over the last decade. Software composition analysis tools can map your dependency tree in minutes. Vulnerability databases are updated in near real-time. Compliance frameworks have codified what "good" looks like for managing open-source risk. The toolchain — Snyk, Sonatype, Black Duck, OpenVAS, Wazuh, and dozens of others — is genuinely impressive.

And yet, organizations are still carrying the same CVEs year after year. Security teams are still explaining the same open findings to auditors. Engineering backlogs are still full of vulnerability tickets that never seem to close.

The reason isn't that the tools don't work. It's that modern OSSM was designed around a premise that doesn't hold for a significant and growing portion of enterprise software: the premise that a patch exists.

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The Patch Assumption

Every major component of open source security management — SCA, vulnerability scanning, supply chain tracking, remediation workflows — assumes that when a vulnerability is identified, there's an upstream fix to apply. Find the CVE, apply the patch, close the ticket.

That model works beautifully for actively maintained software. It breaks entirely for software that has reached end-of-life.

When an open-source project stops supporting older version lines, the CVEs don't stop. They keep appearing in the NVD. Scanners keep flagging them. Compliance frameworks still require remediation. But the upstream project will not release a patch. The only "fix" available is migrating to a version or alternative that the organization may not be ready to adopt.

This creates what we call the EOL gap: a category of vulnerability that exists permanently in your risk posture, that your tooling surfaces but cannot resolve, and that your standard remediation processes were not designed to handle.

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The Scale of the Problem

This isn't a fringe scenario. It's the dominant reality for enterprise software stacks.

The 2025 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report found that 90% of jQuery instances in scanned codebases were more than four years out of date. Eight of the top ten high-risk vulnerabilities in the entire report were jQuery-related. jQuery UI carries four known XSS vulnerabilities — CVE-2021-41182, CVE-2021-41183, CVE-2021-41184, and CVE-2010-5312 — that will never receive upstream patches on version lines prior to 1.13.

AngularJS reached end-of-life in December 2021. It still runs in production across thousands of enterprise applications. Spring Framework 5.x, multiple Node.js LTS lines, and dozens of other foundational libraries have followed the same trajectory. Enterprise vendors including IBM, NetApp, and Telerik have issued security bulletins specifically about EOL open-source components in their products.

If your application was built between 2010 and 2020, EOL dependencies are likely somewhere in your stack — often pulled in transitively, often invisible to the people currently maintaining the application. The OSSRA data suggests this isn't a probability. It's close to a certainty.

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Why EOL Is a Different Kind of Risk

Security teams that have thought carefully about EOL risk often describe it as a different category from standard vulnerability risk — not just a harder version of the same problem.

A standard unpatched vulnerability carries execution risk: the organization knows a fix exists and hasn't applied it yet. The remediation path is defined. The question is timeline.

An EOL vulnerability carries structural risk: the remediation path doesn't exist within the current architecture. No amount of patching discipline resolves it. The question isn't timeline — it's capability and resourcing for a migration that may touch dozens of systems and require months of engineering effort.

When these two categories get mixed together in a vulnerability backlog, the structural risk becomes invisible. It looks like slow remediation when it's actually a different problem requiring a different response.

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A Complete OSSM Program Addresses EOL Explicitly

Reframing EOL as a first-class pillar of open source security management changes what "complete" looks like for an OSSM program. It means:

Inventory that includes EOL status. Version numbers alone aren't sufficient. A dependency inventory that doesn't track whether each component is within its support window is missing information that materially affects risk prioritization.

Separate reporting for EOL findings. Mixing EOL CVEs with standard vulnerability findings obscures the risk profile and makes it harder to have the right conversations — with engineering about migration timelines, with leadership about resource allocation, with auditors about control rationale.

Defined controls for EOL components. The control options for EOL software are different from standard vulnerability management: migration, compensating controls, architectural isolation, or commercial extended support. "Waiting for the patch" is not a control. Each EOL component in production should have a documented control and an owner.

Proactive EOL monitoring. Open-source projects announce end-of-life dates. A mature OSSM program tracks those dates and initiates risk assessments before EOL occurs — not after the first post-EOL CVE appears in a scanner report.

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The Commercial Extended Support Option

One control that has become more prominent as EOL risk has grown: commercial never-ending support (NES) for EOL open-source components. Providers like HeroDevs maintain patched forks of foundational libraries — jQuery UI, AngularJS, Spring Framework, and others — and backport security fixes into the version lines enterprises are actually running.

For security teams, this means CVEs get actual code fixes — not scanner exceptions or risk acceptance forms — which closes findings and satisfies compliance requirements. For engineering teams, it eliminates the pressure to execute a high-risk migration on a compressed timeline. For compliance officers, it produces clean audit evidence: the vulnerability was remediated with a code fix.

Commercial extended support isn't a substitute for migration. Moving to maintained, modern software is still the right long-term answer. But NES functions as a legitimate bridge control — one that converts an unresolvable open finding into a closed, managed one while the organization builds toward the better architecture on a timeline that makes sense.

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Closing the Gap

The open source security management ecosystem has the tools, the frameworks, and the talent to handle the risks it was designed for. The gap is in how OSSM programs account for the point at which upstream support permanently ends.

Closing that gap requires treating EOL as what it actually is: not a harder version of standard vulnerability management, but a distinct risk category with its own inventory requirements, its own control options, and its own place in the compliance and audit conversation.

The organizations that build this into their OSSM programs now will have cleaner audits, shorter backlogs, and a more honest picture of their actual risk posture. The ones that don't will keep explaining the same open findings — and running the same migrations under pressure — for years to come.

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