Pushed by market forces, software development has become fast-paced. As a consequence, modern development projects are assembled from 3rd-party components. Security & privacy assurance techniques once designed for large, controlled updates over months or years, must now cope with small, continuous changes taking place withing a week, and happening in sub-components that are controlled by third party developers one might not even know they existed.

In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the current software security approaches and evaluate their appropriateness in the face of a changed nature in software development.

We have observed current software engineering trends and introduced the Multi-party Open Software and Services (MOSS) term to capture its dual nature. Then we have reviewed the novel security events and analysed how nowadays software security approaches cope with them.

Software security assurance could benefit by switching from a process-based to an artefact-based approach. Further, security evaluation might need to be more incremental, automated and decentralized. We believe this can be achieved by supporting mechanisms for lightweight and scalable screenings that are applicable to the entire population of software components albeit there might be a price to pay.