Dep-Scan – Fully Open-Source Security Audit For Project Dependencies Based On Known Vulnerabilities And Advisories. Supports Both Local Repos And Container Images. Integrates With Various CI Environments Such As Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, Google CloudBuild

dep-scan is a fully open-source security audit tool for project dependencies based on known vulnerabilities, advisories and license limitations. Both local repositories and container images are supported as input. The tool is ideal for CI environments with built-in build breaker logic.

If you have just come across this repo, probably the best place to start is to checkout the parent project slscan which include depscan along with a number of other tools.

Features

• Local repos and container image based scanning with CVE insights [1]
• Package vulnerability scanning is performed locally and is quite fast. No server is used!
• Suggest optimal fix version by package group (See suggest mode)
• Perform deep packages risk audit for dependency confusion attacks and maintenance risks (See risk audit)

NOTE:

• [1] Only application related packages in container images are included in scanning. OS packages are not included yet.

Vulnerability Data sources

• OSV
• NVD
• GitHub
• NPM

Usage

dep-scan is ideal for use during continuous integration (CI) and also as a tool for local development.

Use with ShiftLeft Scan

dep-scan is integrated with scan, a free and open-source SAST tool. To enable this feature simply pass depscan to the --type argument. Refer to the scan documentation for more information.

---
--type python,depscan,credscan

This approach should work for all CI environments supported by scan.

Scanning projects locally (Python version)

sudo npm install -g @appthreat/cdxgen
pip install appthreat-depscan

This would install two commands called cdxgen and scan.

You can invoke the scan command directly with the various options.

cd <project to scan>
depscan --src $PWD --report_file $PWD/reports/depscan.json

Full list of options are below:

usage: depscan [-h] [--no-banner] [--cache] [--sync] [--suggest] [--risk-audit] [--private-ns PRIVATE_NS] [-t PROJECT_TYPE] [--bom BOM] -i SRC_DIR [-o REPORT_FILE]
              [--no-error]
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --no-banner           Do not display banner
  --cache               Cache vulnerability information in platform specific user_data_dir
  --sync                Sync to receive the latest vulnerability data. Should have invoked cache first.
  --suggest             Suggest appropriate fix version for each identified vulnerability.
  --risk-audit          Perform package risk audit (slow operation). Npm only.
  --private-ns PRIVATE_NS
                        Private namespace to use while performing oss risk audit. Private packages should not be available in public registries by default. Comma
                        sep   arated values accepted.
  -t PROJECT_TYPE, --type PROJECT_TYPE
                        Override project type if auto-detection is incorrect
  --bom BOM             Examine using the given Software Bill-of-Materials (SBoM) file in CycloneDX format. Use cdxgen command to produce one.
  -i SRC_DIR, --src SRC_DIR
                        Source directory
  -o REPORT_FILE, --report_file REPORT_FILE
                        Report filename with directory
  --no-error            Continue on error to prevent build from breaking

Scanning containers locally (Python version)

Scan latest tag of the container shiftleft/scan-slim

depscan --no-error --cache --src shiftleft/scan-slim -o containertests/depscan-scan.json -t docker

Include license to the type to perform license audit.

depscan --no-error --cache --src shiftleft/scan-slim -o containertests/depscan-scan.json -t docker,license

You can also specify the image using the sha256 digest

depscan --no-error --src redmine@sha256:a5c5f8a64a0d9a436a0a6941bc3fb156be0c89996add834fe33b66ebeed2439e -o containertests/depscan-redmine.json -t docker

You can also save container images using docker or podman save command and pass the archive to depscan for scanning.

docker save -o /tmp/scanslim.tar shiftleft/scan-slim:latest
# podman save --format oci-archive -o /tmp/scanslim.tar shiftleft/scan-slim:latest
depscan --no-error --src /tmp/scanslim.tar -o reports/depscan-scan.json -t docker

Refer to the docker tests under GitHub action workflow for this repo for more examples.

Scanning projects locally (Docker container)

appthreat/dep-scan or quay.io/appthreat/dep-scan container image can be used to perform the scan.

To scan with default settings

docker run --rm -v $PWD:/app appthreat/dep-scan scan --src /app --report_file /app/reports/depscan.json

To scan with custom environment variables based configuration

docker run --rm 
    -e VDB_HOME=/db 
    -e NVD_START_YEAR=2010 
    -e GITHUB_PAGE_COUNT=5 
    -e GITHUB_TOKEN=<token> 
    -v /tmp:/db 
    -v $PWD:/app appthreat/dep-scan scan --src /app --report_file /app/reports/depscan.json

In the above example, /tmp is mounted as /db into the container. This directory is then specified as VDB_HOME for caching the vulnerability information. This way the database can be cached and reused to improve performance.

Supported languages and package format

dep-scan uses cdxgen command internally to create Software Bill-of-Materials (SBoM) file for the project. This is then used for performing the scans.

The following projects and package-dependency format is supported by cdxgen.

NOTE

The docker image for dep-scan currently doesn’t bundle suitable java and maven commands required for bom generation. To workaround this limitation, you can –

1. Use python-based execution from a VM containing the correct versions for java, maven and gradle.
2. Generate the bom file by invoking cdxgen command locally and subsequently passing this to dep-scan via the --bom argument.

Integration with CI environments

Integration with Azure DevOps

Refer to this example yaml configuration for integrating dep-scan with Azure Pipelines. The build step would perform the scan and display the report inline as shown below:

Integration with GitHub Actions

This tool can be used with GitHub Actions using this action.

This repo self-tests itself with both sast-scan and dep-scan! Check the GitHub workflow file of this repo.

- name: Self dep-scan
  uses: AppThreat/dep-scan-action@master
  env:
    VDB_HOME: ${{ github.workspace }}/db
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Customisation through environment variables

The following environment variables can be used to customise the behaviour.

• VDB_HOME – Directory to use for caching database. For docker based execution, this directory should get mounted as a volume from the host
• NVD_START_YEAR – Default: 2018. Supports upto 2002
• GITHUB_PAGE_COUNT – Default: 2. Supports upto 20

GitHub Security Advisory

To download security advisories from GitHub, a personal access token with the following scope is necessary.

• read:packages

export GITHUB_TOKEN="<PAT token>"

Suggest mode

Fix version for each vulnerability is retrieved from the sources. Sometimes, there might be known vulnerabilities in the fix version reported. Eg: in the below screenshot the fix versions suggested for jackson-databind might contain known vulnerabilities.

By passing an argument --suggest it is possible to force depscan to recheck the fix suggestions. This way the suggestion becomes more optimal for a given package group.

Notice, how the new suggested version is 2.9.10.5 which is an optimal fix version. Please note that the optimal fix version may not be the appropriate version for your application based on compatibility.

Package Risk audit

--risk-audit argument enables package risk audit. Currently, only npm and pypi packages are supported in this mode. A number of risk factors are identified and assigned weights to compute a final risk score. Packages that then exceed a maximum risk score (config.pkg_max_risk_score) are presented in a table.

Use --private-ns to specify the private package namespace that should be checked for dependency confusion type issues where a private package is available on public npm/pypi registry.

Example to check if private packages with namespaces @appthreat and @shiftleft are not accidentally made public use the below argument.

--private-ns appthreat,shiftleft

Refer to pkg_query.py::get_category_score method for the risk formula.

Automatic adjustment

A parameter called created_now_quarantine_seconds is used to identify packages that are safely past the quarantine period (1 year). Certain risks such as pkg_min_versions and pkg_min_maintainers are suppressed for packages past the quarantine period. This adjustment helps reduce noise since it is unlikely that a malicious package can exist in a registry unnoticed for over a year.

Configuring weights

All parameters can be customized by using environment variables. For eg:

export PKG_MIN_VERSIONS=4 to increase and set the minimum versions category to 4.

License scan

dep-scan can scan the dependencies for any license limitations and report them directly on the console log. To enable license scanning set the environment variable FETCH_LICENSE to true.

export FETCH_LICENSE=true

The licenses data is sourced from choosealicense.com and is quite limited. If the license of a given package cannot be reliably matched against this list it will get silently ignored to reduce any noise. This behaviour could change in the future once the detection logic gets improved.

Alternatives

Dependency Check is considered to be the industry standard for open-source dependency scanning. After personally using this great product for a number of years I decided to write my own from scratch partly as a dedication to this project. By using a streaming database based on msgpack and using json schema, dep-scan is more performant than dependency check in CI environments. Plus with support for GitHub advisory source and grafeas report export and submission, dep-scan is on track to become a next-generation dependency audit tool

There are a number of other tools that piggy back on Sonatype ossindex API server. For some reason, I always felt uncomfortable letting a commercial company track the usage of various projects across the world. dep-scan is therefore 100% private and guarantees never to perform any tracking!

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