State of SDLC Security 2026
How software reuse, automation, and AI are reshaping risk across the SDLC.
Modern application risk is not isolated to individual vulnerabilities. This report shows how risk concentrates and propagates across shared dependencies, developer environments, CI/CD systems, and AI-driven workflows.
Fact 1
1. Risk concentrates where software is reused most
Across ecosystems, dependency adoption follows a power-law distribution, where a relatively small set of packages appears across a disproportionate share of organizations. As a result, weaknesses in widely reused components can quickly become systemic exposure events across thousands of environments.
Fact 2
2. Developer environments concentrate privilege and trust
Developer endpoints sit at the center of the SDLC trust chain with direct access to code, credentials, and deployment pipelines. Development environments are also highly concentrated around macOS, with Darwin accounting for roughly 86% of observed developer systems. At the same time, extensions and AI tooling introduce a fragmented and difficult-to-govern trust layer on top of that standardized foundation.
Fact 3
3. CI/CD automation turns reuse into immediate impact
CI/CD systems combine execution and automation to create a direct path from development access to production impact. A relatively small set of actions and workflow components dominates these environments, concentrating risk in the most widely adopted pipelines rather than distributing it evenly across automation systems.
Fact 4
4. AI accelerates development, scaling impacts across environments
AI-assisted development is now common and is increasing the speed and scale of software production, making insecure patterns easier to generate and replicate across environments. Shared generation logic and insecure defaults can create repeatable weaknesses across multiple applications.
Conclusions
Securing the modern SDLC requires moving beyond finding individual vulnerabilities to understanding and governing the concentrated trust and automated execution paths.
Download the full report to discover how to identify and prioritize the high-impact weaknesses in the systems that build, trust, and ship your software.