Cyber Resilience Act: Your Action Plan - Part III: Chainloop, Your Launchpad for CRA Readiness
Victoria PonceThis is the third article in our multi-part series: “Cyber Resilience Act: Your Action Plan”.
- Part I: What You Need to Know About and Why You Can’t Wait (read)
- Part II: How to Break Down Your Compliance Strategy (read)
- Part III: Chainloop, Your Launchpad for CRA Readiness (this article)
Parts I and II covered what CRA means and how to plan your approach. Now comes the hard part: executing that plan without overwhelming your teams with manual work.
The September 2026 deadline demands a new way of working. Traditional compliance is reactive: you gather evidence after decisions are made, often weeks or months later. However, CRA requires ongoing evidence collection and real-time reporting, while modern development teams deploy multiple times per day. Manual processes simply can’t keep pace with both fast development cycles and continuous evidence collection requirements. Instead of chasing compliance through meetings and spreadsheets, you need compliance evidence flowing automatically through your development process. Most organizations struggle because traditional compliance approaches break down when you try to execute them across multiple teams and daily deployments.
That’s what Chainloop delivers: automated CRA compliance without disrupting your existing development workflows.
How Chainloop Supports Your Journey to CRA Compliance
The most successful organizations don’t treat compliance as a manual process. They automate it. Chainloop applies this thinking to CRA compliance. Your security requirements and compliance policies become automated guardrails. Evidence collection happens automatically during everyday development work. Your compliance status becomes as visible and reliable as your application performance.
Real-time CRA compliance tracking showing 82% completion status, requirements matrix, and trend analysis.
Using our frameworks feature, Chainloop helps you manage CRA compliance across all your products. You can apply the CRA framework to any project and automatically track compliance as your development pipelines send signed evidence like SBOMs and vulnerability scan reports through defined workflows. These workflows verify evidence against compliance “contracts” that represent your security requirements as code.
Creating Automatic Evidence Collection
Traditional compliance creates “evidence debt.” You constantly accumulate the burden of manually collecting and organizing proof that you meet requirements. This debt would become crushing with CRA’s vulnerability monitoring and reporting requirements.
Chainloop flips this model. Instead of collecting evidence after the fact, your development workflows create it automatically. Every build produces compliance artifacts, every security scan generates auditable records, and every deployment leaves a verifiable trail. All of this evidence flows into Chainloop’s central evidence store, creating a single source of truth for your compliance posture.
Automated evidence collection showing interconnected compliance artifacts and their provenance relationships.
The result? When auditors come calling, you don’t scramble to find evidence. You simply query the evidence that’s been building up automatically.
Making Compliance Invisible to Developers
The best compliance systems work behind the scenes. Developers never think about them until they need guidance. Chainloop provides immediate, clear feedback right in the development environment for instance in the CI/CD jobs (GitLab, Github, Jenkins, etc.)
Security scan fails? Developers get immediate feedback on what went wrong, directly in their familiar tools. Missing compliance artifact? The build pipeline shows exactly what’s needed. Policy violation? The system explains what changed and how to resolve it. Compliance and security checks become as routine as running tests.
The diagram below shows how CRA compliance integrates seamlessly into your existing development lifecycle, from development through release and ongoing vulnerability management:
CRA compliance workflow showing integration points across development, release, and vulnerability scanning workflows.
Automated policy checks, manual evidence verification, and self-assessment checklists keep your compliance status continuously updated and visible on your dashboard. You’re not just gathering evidence. You’re creating auditable proof of compliance that scales across your entire product portfolio.
Chainloop supports compliance tracking for vulnerability management and secure-by-design requirements. This directly addresses Phase I and Phase II of the action plan outlined in Part II: How to Break Down Your Compliance Strategy. You can immediately start meeting the first major CRA milestone: reporting actively exploited vulnerabilities for products already in the EU market by September 2026.
We’re adding support for remaining CRA requirements to ensure you stay ahead of compliance deadlines.
Chainloop & Phase I: Vulnerability Management
CRA requires you to handle vulnerabilities systematically. Based on CRA Annex I, Part II, and alignment with frameworks like NIST SSDF, this translates into six key practices:
- Identify all components in your software and provide a software bill of materials (SBOM)
- Set up vulnerability reporting so users and researchers can report issues
- Run regular vulnerability scans to find known issues in all software components
- Fix vulnerabilities based on risk with clear timelines and priorities
- Maintain a coordinated vulnerability disclosure policy explaining how you handle reports
- Provide quick security updates and transparent communication about vulnerabilities
The six interconnected vulnerability management practices mapped to the eight CRA requirements from Annex I, Part II (vulnerability handling).
These six practices form the foundation of vulnerability management. Chainloop supports these CRA requirements by providing opinionated automated policies that implement proven industry practices while adding specific CRA compliance checks. We start with the essential baseline that aligns with CRA requirements, but you can fully customize and extend it to match your organization’s specific needs. Additionally, our policy catalog offers pre-built policies for common scenarios, so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.
Automated Policy Enforcement:
- SBOM Generation: Built-in policies ensure every software release includes a complete, compliant SBOM with all required components and metadata.
- Continuous Scanning: Automated verification ensures software composition analysis runs daily across all supported product versions.
- Remediation Tracking: Policies verify that critical vulnerabilities in released versions get fixed within 48 hours.
Guided Manual Processes: For vulnerability reporting, coordinated disclosure, and update distribution, Chainloop helps your team with structured confirmation steps, including security advisories and public contact management.
Example of Chainloop’s manual evidence collection interface for vulnerability handling processes.
Evidence Collection: All compliance activities are automatically logged with cryptographic audit trails. Without extra work, you have the documentation required for regulatory reporting and audits.
Our platform continues to expand capabilities for reporting actively exploited vulnerabilities to authorities, ensuring comprehensive vulnerability management coverage.
Chainloop & Phase II: Secure-by-Design Practices
Beyond vulnerability management, Phase II focuses on integrating security throughout your development process. Our self-assessment checklist helps your team verify compliance with CRA’s essential security requirements:
- Risk Assessment and Threat Modeling: Systematic identification of security requirements.
- Secure Architecture Design: Implementation and testing of security controls.
- Secure Development Practices: Code security, trusted components, and testing strategies.
CRA essential cybersecurity requirements (Annex I, Part I) mapped to secure-by-design practices across the SDLC.
Many of these checks are currently manual, but we’re actively developing automated policy validations to verify secure-by-design controls directly in your development workflows. This checklist gives you a practical first step toward incorporating security into your design and development while we build full automation.
Chainloop’s self-assessment checklist interface showing manual evidence collection for secure-by-design practices.
Chainloop & Phase III: Transparency
We’re expanding Chainloop to include transparency requirements like technical documentation, CE marking, and conformity declarations (required by December 2027). We’re building these capabilities into Chainloop to keep you ahead of compliance deadlines.
These transparency requirements include:
- User documentation explaining security features and configurations
- Technical documentation for authorities and conformity assessments
- CE marking and declarations of conformity for market access
- Product support period communication to users and customers
Turn Your Plan into Action
The Cyber Resilience Act sets high standards but creates a unique opportunity to build security, transparency, and trust into your product development. Chainloop transforms CRA compliance from a regulatory burden into a strategic capability that strengthens your entire software delivery operation.
Our platform already supports key CRA obligations for vulnerability management and secure-by-design practices, enabling you to meet the 2026 reporting deadline confidently. We’re developing support for the remaining 2027 requirements, so you’re building a comprehensive compliance strategy that enhances your security posture and competitive edge.
The diagram below shows the action plan we presented in Part II: How to Break Down Your Compliance Strategy:
CRA compliance phases mapped to software development lifecycle stages and regulatory obligations.
Chainloop automates this entire journey. Instead of manual coordination, email chains, and days of waiting for compliance evidence, you get automated policies enforced across development pipelines. Missing or non-compliant evidence triggers immediate, actionable feedback. All evidence gets automatically collected, signed, and stored in a central evidence store: no chasing reports, no waiting on emails, no holding releases while someone assembles documentation.
Teams using Chainloop reduce audit and security review 10x time while maintaining quality standards. The automated approach provides faster development cycles, continuous risk monitoring, reduced manual overhead, and clearer feedback for developers.
This streamlined process scales across your entire release pipeline, helping you meet CRA requirements while maintaining development velocity.
Ready to Start Your CRA Journey?
Explore the Details: For implementation specifics and best practices, dive deeper with our CRA Reference Documentation and Compliance Tracking Guide.
Get Personalized Guidance: Talk to our team, and we’ll help assess your current compliance status and customize your CRA implementation plan.
Begin Building Today: The September 2026 deadline isn’t negotiable, but your path to compliance can be streamlined, automated, and integrated into your existing workflows. Questions or want to talk strategy? Contact us — we’re here to help.
Let’s build your path to compliance, together.
