Vulnerability Scanner for Open Source

Finally, Google has released the OSV-scanner as a free tool that gives opensource developers access to vulnerability information which may relevant to their projects.

With the new launching OSV.dev service, it allows all the different opensource ecosystems and vulnerability databases to publish and consume information in one simple, precise, and machine readable format (JSON).

OSV-scanner is an effort to provide supported fronted to the OSV database (OSV.dev) that connects a project's list of dependencies with vulnerabilities that affect them. 

There are a few ways to use OSV:

• Use the API 
• Use the command line
• Integrate with OpenSSF Scorecard's vulnerability check
  

So, let's get start running the OSV-scanner on your project to find all the dependencies that are being used by analyzing manifests, SBOMs, and commit hashes. The scanner hen connects this information with the centralized OSV database and displays the vulnerabilities relevant to your project.

Links:

• Announcing OSV-Scanner: Vulnerability Scanner for Open Source - (Dec 13, 2022)
  
• Announcing a unified vulnerability schema for open source - (Jun 24, 2021) 
  
• Launching OSV - Better vulnerability triage for open source - (Feb 5, 2021)
  
• SLSA
• https://github.com/ossf/osv-schema
• OpenSSF Scorecard 
  

OpenSSF Scorecard

OpenSSF Scorecard is one of the initiative from Open Source Security Foundation or OpenSSF. It is a tool to provide quick access to opensource projects for any risky practices via automated checks.

To run the checks, there are 2 ways:

1. Run automatically on code you own using the GitHub Action
2. Run manually on your (or somebody else’s) project via the Command Line
   

Scorecard checks for vulnerabilities affecting different parts of the software chain including source code, build, dependencies, testing, and project maintenance.

Links:

• OpenSSF Scorecard