Tag: checking

Automated vulnerability checking of software dependencies

The OWASP organization is focused on improving the security of software systems and regularly publishes lists with security risks, such as the OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks or the Mobile Top 10 Security Risks. Among these are common attack vectors like command injections, buffer overruns, stack buffer overflow attacks and SQL injections.

When developing software you have to be aware of these in order to avoid and prevent them. If your project depends on third-party software components, such as open source libraries, you have to assess those dependencies for security risks as well. It is not enough to do this just once. You have to check them regularly and watch for any known, publicly disclosed, vulnerabilities in these dependencies.

Publicly known information-security vulnerabilities are tracked according to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) standard. Each vulnerability is assigned an ID, for example CVE-2009-2704, and published in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) by the U.S. government. Here’s an example for such an entry.

Automated Dependency Checking

There are tools and services to automatically check the dependencies of your project against these publicly known vulnerabilities, for example the OWASP Dependency Check or the Sonatype OSS Index. In order to use them your project has to use a dependency manager, for example Maven in the Java world or NuGet in the .NET ecosystem.

Here’s how to integrate the OWASP Dependency Check into your Maven based project, by adding the following plugin to the pom.xml file:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.owasp</groupId>
  <artifactId>dependency-check-maven</artifactId>
  <version>5.0.0-M1</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <goals>
        <goal>check</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

When you run the Maven goal dependency-check:check you might see an output like this:

One or more dependencies were identified with known vulnerabilities in Project XYZ:

jboss-j2eemgmt-api_1.1_spec-1.0.1.Final.jar (pkg:maven/org.jboss.spec.javax.management.j2ee/jboss-j2eemgmt-api_1.1_spec@1.0.1.Final, cpe:2.3:a:sun:j2ee:1.0.1:*:*:*:*:*:*:*) : CVE-2009-2704, CVE-2009-2705
...

The output tells you which version of a dependency is affected and the CVE ID. Now you can use this ID to look it up in the NVD database and inform yourself about the potential dangers of the vulnerability and take action, like updating the dependency if there is a newer version, which addresses the vulnerability.