Operational Software Assurance

Operational Software Assurance, or OSA, is the practice of keeping deployed software secure, protected, and compliant throughout its operational life.

Traditional Software Assurance focuses primarily on how software is built and acquired. OSA extends assurance into operations, addressing binaries, firmware, and fielded systems that may remain in use for years or decades and cannot always be easily rewritten or patched.

The amount of deployed software is growing at the same time AI is making vulnerabilities easier to discover and exploits faster to develop.

Many embedded, certified, air-gapped, and mission-critical systems cannot patch at the same speed. Operational Software Assurance addresses the resulting gap by focusing on whether software remains secure and resilient after it has been deployed.

Traditional Software Assurance asks: Did we build and acquire the software securely?

Operational Software Assurance adds another question: Is that software staying secure, protected, and compliant while it is running in the field?

The two approaches are complementary. Software Assurance builds confidence before deployment; Operational Software Assurance sustains that confidence afterward.

Finding vulnerabilities is important, but identifying a flaw does not make the software unexploitable.

As vulnerability discovery accelerates, organizations increasingly need to determine whether a vulnerability is actually present, reachable, and exploitable in the software they deployed and protect the system when remediation cannot happen immediately.

Operational Software Assurance shifts the focus from simply counting vulnerabilities to managing their real operational risk.

Embedded Runtime Security, or ERS, is the discipline within the Protect pillar of Operational Software Assurance.

It refers to active, in-place protections that make exploitation of deployed binaries and firmware more difficult or cause an exploit attempt to fail at runtime. These protections are designed for environments where changing source code, deploying traditional endpoint agents, or waiting for a patch may not be practical.

Software memory protection is a central capability within ERS.

The Digital Golden Dome is the policy metaphor Lionfish Tech Advisors uses for the runtime protection component of Operational Software Assurance.

Just as a physical defense system is designed to intercept a threat before it reaches its target, the Digital Golden Dome describes protections designed to prevent an exploit from successfully taking control of deployed software when an attack occurs.

RunSafe’s work aligns most closely with the Protect pillar of Operational Software Assurance and the discipline of Embedded Runtime Security.

RunSafe focuses on reducing exploitability in deployed binaries and firmware, particularly in environments where software is difficult to patch, rewrite, or replace. Operational Software Assurance is the broader market category that spans Identify, Protect, and Comply.