Before merging with a software company, the acquiring company's legal team requires a detailed software...

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) is specifically designed to identify third-party and open-source components incorporated into software. It can enumerate libraries and dependencies, identify their versions, associate components with known vulnerabilities, and provide licensing information. This directly satisfies the legal team's requirement to determine whether the codebase contains open-source or commercially licensed libraries.

CISA's software supply-chain guidance recognizes software composition analysis and software bills of materials as mechanisms for obtaining visibility into software components. CISA guidance also notes that SBOM information can include both open-source and commercial third-party software and licensing information.

SAST examines source or compiled code for security weaknesses such as unsafe functions, data-flow problems, or coding vulnerabilities, but dependency licensing is not its primary purpose. DAST tests a running application from the outside and generally cannot inventory the complete component dependency tree. RASP operates within a running application to detect or prevent attacks. Credentialed infrastructure scanning identifies system-level vulnerabilities and configuration issues rather than software-license composition.

The strongest clue is the requirement to identify libraries and their licensing status , which directly maps to SCA.

Study Guide Reference: Vulnerability Management → Application Security Testing → SCA → Third-Party Components → Open-Source Dependencies → SBOM → Licensing and Vulnerability Analysis.