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Open Source Vulnerability Detector

An auditing tool for detecting vulnerabilities, powered by advisory databases that follow the OSV specification.

Currently, this uses the ecosystem databases provided by osv.dev.

Installation

To install locally:

1. Download a release
2. Rename it to osv-detector
3. Make it executable
4. Put it somewhere that's on your PATH (optional)
   • /usr/local/bin is usually a good place on Ubuntu

You can use this script to install the latest version from GitHub (make sure to change the binary architecture if you're on macOS or Windows):

OSV_DETECTOR_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/G-Rath/osv-detector/releases/latest" | perl -nle'print substr($&, 1) while m#"tag_name": "\K[^"]*#g')
OSV_DETECTOR_BINARY="osv-detector_${OSV_DETECTOR_VERSION}_linux_amd64"

curl -fL "https://github.com/G-Rath/osv-detector/releases/download/v$OSV_DETECTOR_VERSION/$OSV_DETECTOR_BINARY" --output /tmp/osv-detector
chmod +x /tmp/osv-detector
sudo mv /tmp/osv-detector /usr/local/bin/osv-detector

If you're using GitHub Actions, you can use the check-with-osv-detector action.

Usage

The detector accepts a path to a "lockfile" which contains information about the versions of packages:

osv-detector path/to/my/package-lock.json
osv-detector path/to/my/composer.lock

# you can also pass multiple files
osv-detector path/to/my/package-lock.json path/to/my/composer.lock

# or a directory which is expected to contain at least one supported lockfile
osv-detector path/to/my/

The detector supports parsing the following lockfiles:

*: pom.xml and requirements.txt are technically not lockfiles, as they don't have to specify the complete dependency tree and can have version constraints/ranges. When parsing these files, the detector will assume the lowest version possible for non-exact dependencies, and will ignore anything that is not a dependency specification (e.g. flags or files in the case of requirements.txt, though <properties> is supported for pom.xml)

The detector will attempt to automatically determine the parser to use for each file based on the filename - you can also explicitly specify the parser to use by prefixing it to the start of the given path, seperated with an : symbol:

osv-detector requirements.txt:path/to/my/requirements/ requirements.txt:path/to/my/file.txt

If you have a path with a colon in its name, you can with just a colon to explicitly signal to the detector that it should infer the parser based on the filename:

osv-detector ':/path/to/my:projects/package-lock.json'

You can also set the default parser to use for all files with the --parse-as flag:

osv-detector --parse-as 'package-lock.json' path/to/my/file.lock

By default, the detector attempts to detect known vulnerabilities by checking the versions of packages specified by the OVSs in the loaded OSV databases, comparing based on the version ordering rules for the specific ecosystem being checked as closely as possible (see this section for more details about version handling).

This allows the detector to be very fast and work offline, but does not support commits which means the detector can report false positives when using git-based dependencies.

You can disable dynamically loading the ecosystem databases by passing --use-dbs=false.

You can also have the detector use the osv.dev API to check for known vulnerabilities by supplying the --use-api flag. The API is very fast, typically a few hours ahead of the offline databases, and supports commits; however it currently can produce false negatives for some ecosystems.

While the API supports commits, the detector currently has limited support for extracting them - only the composer.lock, Gemfile.lock, package-lock.json, yarn.lock, & pnpm.yaml parsers include commit details

See this section for how you can provide the detector with arbitrary commits to check

You cannot use the API in --offline mode, but you can use both the offline databases and the API together; the detector will remove any duplicate results.

Once all the lockfiles have been pared, the detector will then determine all the databases to load - if --use-dbs is true (which it is by default) then this will include ecosystem specific databases based on the parsed packages.

See this section for details on how to configure extra databases for the detector to use.

Remotely sourced databases will be cached along with their etag and last-modified date for future checks, to determine if those databases need to be updated.

By default, the detector will output the results to stdout as plain text, and exit with an error code of 1 if at least one vulnerability is found. See here for how to configure the detector to ignore certain vulnerabilities.

You can use the --json flag to have the detector output its results as JSON:

osv-detector --json path/to/my/package-lock.json

This will result in a JSON object being printed to stdout with a results property that has an array containing the results of each lockfile that was passed:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "filePath": "path/to/my/go.mod",
      "parsedAs": "go.mod",
      "packages": [
        {
          "name": "github.com/BurntSushi/toml",
          "version": "1.0.0",
          "ecosystem": "Go",
          "vulnerabilities": [],
          "ignored": []
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "filePath": "path/to/my/package-lock.json",
      "parsedAs": "package-lock.json",
      "packages": [
        {
          "name": "wrappy",
          "version": "1.0.2",
          "ecosystem": "npm",
          "vulnerabilities": [],
          "ignored": []
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Errors are always sent to stderr as plain text, even if the --json flag is passed.

Config files

The detector supports loading configuration details from a YAML file, which makes it easy to provide advanced settings (such as extra databases), provide a consistent results whenever the detector is run on a project, and provide an audit trail of ignored vulnerabilities (through version control).

By default, the detector will look for a .osv-detector.yaml or .osv-detector.yml in the same folder as the current lockfile it's checking, and will merge the config with any flags being passed.

You can also provide a path to a specific config file that will be used for all lockfiles being checked with the --config flag:

osv-detector --config ruby-ignores.yml path/to/my/first-ruby-project path/to/my/second-ruby-project

You can have the detector ignore specific parts of the config with the --no-config-ignores and --no-config-databases flags, or ignore any configs all together with the --no-config flag.

Ignoring certain vulnerabilities

Ignored vulnerabilities won't be included in the text output, and won't be counted when determined the code to exit with.

You can provide the detector with a list of IDs for OSVs to ignore when checking lockfiles with the ignore property:

ignore:
  - GHSA-4 # "Prototype pollution in xyz"
  - GHSA-5 # "RegExp DDoS in abc"
  - GHSA-6 # "Command injection in hjk"

You can also use the --ignore flag:

osv-detector --ignore GHSA-896r-f27r-55mw package-lock.json

# you can pass multiple ignores
osv-detector --ignore GHSA-896r-f27r-55mw --ignore GHSA-74fj-2j2h-c42q package-lock.json

Ignores provided via the flag will be combined with any ignores specified in the loaded config file.

You can use --update-config-ignores to have the detector update configs being used for lockfiles to ignore any vulnerabilities that were found; it will also remove ignores for vulnerabilities that are no longer present.

Alternatively, you can use jq to generate a list of OSV ids if you want to ignore all current known vulnerabilities found by the detector:

osv-detector --json . | jq -r  '[.results[].packages | map("- " + .vulnerabilities[].id)] | flatten | unique | sort | .[]'

Extra Databases

You can configure the detector to use extra databases with the extra-databases property:

extra-databases:
  - url: https://github.com/github/advisory-database/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
    name: GitHub Advisory Database
    working-directory: 'advisory-database-main/advisories/github-reviewed' # only load the reviewed advisories

Each extra database must have a url property which specifies the source of the database (for local databases this must begin with file:), but all other properties are optional.

The url should be either:

• the path to a local directory, in which case the url must start with file:
• a url for a remote zip archive; if the url does not end with .zip, you must specify the type as zip
  • if you host your OSV database as a repository on GitHub, it can be consumed as a zip archive
• a url for a rest API that implements the osv.dev API
  • the url should include the /v1 e.g. if you wanted to use the osv.dev staging API you would specify https://api-staging.osv.dev/v1 as the url

The detector will attempt to detect the type of each database based on the above, however you can explicitly provide the type if needed with the type property (such as if you have a zip archive whose url does not end with .zip)

For the file based database sources (dir and zip), the detector will recursively load all .json files from the working-directory relative to the root of the database as OSVs.

The detector assumes that you trust the source of the configuration file and thus the databases that it points to.

If you are using the detector in a way that allows users to provide arbitrary config files that you don't trust, you can use the --no-config-databases flag to have the detector load the rest of the config without any extra databases it may define

This is a very powerful feature as it enables you to create custom OSVs that can be easily consumed by multiple projects and that cover anything you want - for example you could write OSVs to check if you're using versions of packages that are now considered end of life.

This can also be useful for drafting new OSVs or modifications to existing ones, and becomes even more powerful when combined with the ability to pass arbitrary package details, as you can have custom ecosystems and write custom tools to handle extracting the package details.

Here are some further examples of extra-databases:

extra-databases:
  # include a specific osv.dev ecosystem database for any lockfiles being checked
  - url: https://osv-vulnerabilities.storage.googleapis.com/OSS-Fuzz/all.zip
    name: OSS-Fuzz

  # include all the unreviewed advisories
  - url: https://github.com/github/advisory-database/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
    name: GitHub Advisory Database (unreviewed)
    working-directory: 'advisory-database-main/advisories/unreviewed'

  # include the osv staging api
  - url: https://api-staging.osv.dev/v1
    name: GitHub Advisory Database (unreviewed)

  # include a local directory database (relative)
  - url: file:/../relative/path/to/dir
    name: My local database (relative)

  # include a local directory database (root)
  - url: file:////root/path/to/dir
    name: My local database (root)

Offline mode

You can have the detector run purely in offline mode with the --offline flag:

osv-detector --offline path/to/my/file.lock

Remotely sourced databases can only be used in offline mode if they have been cached by the detector as part of a previous run, and API-based databases will be skipped entirely.

The cache is based on the source url of the database, meaning databases that have the same source but different working directories will use the same cache.

Passing arbitrary package details (advanced usage)

The detector supports being passed arbitrary package details in CSV form to check for known vulnerabilities.

This is useful for one-off manual checks (such as when deciding on a new library), or if you have packages that are not specified in a lock (such as vendored dependencies). It also allows you to check packages in ecosystems that the detector doesn't know about, such as NuGet.

You can either pass in CSV rows:

osv-detector --parse-as csv-row 'npm,,@typescript-eslint/types,5.13.0' 'Packagist,sentry/sdk,2.0.4'

or you can specify paths to csv files:

osv-detector --parse-as csv-file path/to/my/first-csv path/to/my/second-csv

Each CSV row represents a package and is made up of at least four fields:

1. The ecosystem that the package is from, which is used as part of identifying if an OSV is about the given package
   • This does not have to be one of the ecosystems referenced in the detector, or in the OSV specification
   • This should be omitted if you are wanting to compare a commit using an API database
2. The ecosystem whose version comparison semantics to use when determining if an OSV applies to the given package
   • This has to be an ecosystem for which the detector supports comparing versions of; this field can be blank if the first field refers to an ecosystem the detector supports comparing, otherwise it should be the ecosystem whose version semantics most closely match that of your arbitrary ecosystem
   • This should be omitted if you are wanting to compare a commit using an API database
3. The name of the package
4. The version of the package, or the SHA of a git commit
   • If you are providing a commit, then you must leave the first two fields empty and ensure an API-based database is loaded i.e. via --use-api

Warning

Do not include a header if you are using a CSV file

The ecosystem does not have to be one listed by the detector as known, meaning you can use any ecosystem that osv.dev provides.

Remember to tell the detector to use the osv.dev API via the --use-api flag if you're wanting to check commits!

You can also omit the version to have the detector list all known vulnerabilities in the loaded database that apply to the given package:

osv-detector --parse-as csv-row 'NuGet,,Yarp.ReverseProxy,'

While this uses the --parse-as flag, these are not considered standard parsers so the detector will not automatically use them when checking directories for lockfiles.

Auxiliary output commands

The detector supports a few auxiliary commands that have it output information which can be useful for debugging issues and general exploring.

--list-ecosystems

Lists all the ecosystems that the detector knows about (aka there is a parser that results in packages from that ecosystem):

$ osv-detector --list-ecosystems
The detector supports parsing for the following ecosystems:
  npm
  crates.io
  RubyGems
  Packagist
  Go
  PyPI

--list-packages

Lists all the packages that the detector was able to parse out of the given lockfile. This can be useful for sense-checking parsers and can also be used for building other tools.

Each package is outputted on its own line, in the format of <ecosystem>: <name>@<version>:

$ osv-detector --list-packages /path/to/my/Gemfile.lock
Loaded 6532 vulnerabilities (including withdrawn, last updated Fri, 04 Mar 2022 00:11:50 GMT)
The following packages were found in /path/to/my/Gemfile.lock:
  RubyGems: ast@2.4.2
  RubyGems: parallel@1.21.0
  RubyGems: parser@3.1.1.0
  RubyGems: rainbow@3.1.1
  RubyGems: regexp_parser@2.2.1
  RubyGems: rexml@3.2.5
  RubyGems: rubocop@1.25.1
  RubyGems: rubocop-ast@1.16.0
  RubyGems: ruby-progressbar@1.11.0
  RubyGems: unicode-display_width@2.1.0

Version parsing and comparing

Versions are compared using an internal semantic package which aims to support compare versions accurately per the version semantics of each ecosystem, falling back to a relaxed version of SemVer that supports unlimited number components followed by a build string.

Components are numbers broken up by dots, e.g. 1.2.3 has the components 1, 2, 3. Anything that is not a number or a dot is considered to be the start of a build string, and anything afterwards (including numbers and dots) are likewise considered to be part of the build string.

Versions are compared by their components first, in order. Versions are not required to have the same number of components to be comparable.

If all components are equal, then the build string is compared (if present).

Build string comparison is not guaranteed to be correct, since they can be in any format. Generally, the comparer attempts to extract numbers from the build strings which are then compared.

Here are examples of versions with build strings that can be accurately compared:

1.0.0.beta.2
1.0.0-rc.0
1.0.0.v3
1.0.0a1

Currently, characters & words in the build string are not factored into the comparison - this means e.g. 1.0.0a2 will be considered greater than 1.0.0b1. Ideally this will be supported in the future.

Versions without a build string are considered to be higher than those with (provided they have the same components).

Improvements to the build string comparor are welcome!

Public packages (pkg/)

A couple of the core packages that power the detector have been made public to allow others to use in their own projects, and to help encourage improvements.

These packages will not receive their own versions and so should be constrained based on their commit hash. They should also be considered as "hopefully stable" - while they're not expected to change, as the detector evolves it might become necessary to change their api in a manner that could be breaking to downstream consumers.

It is hoped that someday these packages will be published independently, once their apis have proven to be truly stable.

Improvements, feature requests, and bug reports for these packages are welcome!