Google wants to help vendors to better scrutinize their own security practices, and to do so its just lent its internal assessment software to the open-source community.

Google says that it uses its Vendor Security Assessment Questionnaire (VSAQ), which is actually a collection of several “self-adapting questionnaires”, to assess the security risks associated with hundreds of vendors it works with each year. Now, it’s making VSAQ available for anyone to use – including vendors and their suppliers – so they can establish the best way to improve their own security measures.

Lukas Weichselbaum and Daniel Fabian of Google’s Security Team jointly penned a blog post in which they explained how useful VSAQ can be, not only for gathering information, but also for “evaluating multiple aspects of a vendor’s security and privacy posture.”

Google says that many vendors have used the questionnaire to identify security problems and areas where improvements can be made, in order to tackle weaknesses in their security. It also said that numerous vendors had expressed an interest in using VSAQ to evaluate their own suppliers as well, hence the decision to open-source it.

By giving vendors the opportunity to scrutinize their suppliers, Google is taking an important step. After all, no matter how much money a company pours into its security efforts, it’s defenses are only as strong as the weakest link. Many suppliers are plugged into larger vendor’s networks, which means attackers could potentially infiltrate that vendor by breaching the supplier’s defense first.

Google hopes that VSAQ and other assessment tools will become common across the board, allowing larger enterprises to identify weaknesses in third parties and their own networks, and tackle these problems before a serious breach takes place.

The VSAQ Framework is now available under a 2.0 Apache License on GitHub.

“We hope it will help companies spin up, or further improve their own vendor security programs,” Google said. “We also hope the base questionnaires can serve as a self-assessment tool for security-conscious companies and developers looking to improve their security posture.”

Image credit: Yuri Samoilov via flickr.com