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Security Reviews

This repository contains a collection of security reviews of open source software. It is a public resource that anyone can contribute to, and is consumable by anyone under a permissive license.

View the Security Reviews

How do I submit a review?

Note: Do not disclose "new" or "unknown" vulnerabilities in other projects to this project or to this repository.

1. Choose an open source component.
2. Complete the form on the QuickStart page (this will generate your review as a markdown file).
3. Clone this repository and add your security review to the relevant path in the reviews directory (see Naming Reviews).
4. Submit a pull request!

Naming Reviews

The name of a security review should be readable, using hyphen-separated lowercase letters, and should be placed in the most relevant path in the reviews directory. For example, a security review of Django could be placed in the pypi/django path, and a review of Zlib could be placed in the github/madler/zlib path. It is likely the relevant path for your security review has not yet been created, as this repository is still a work in progress. If that is the case, please create the relevant path for your review.

If a review reflects multiple projects across different package managers (e.g. Django exists on both GitHub and PyPI), please file the project in location users are most likely to look for it (in this case, PyPI). If you get stuck, feel free to ask in an Issue or Pull Request.

Removing Reviews

If you believe that a security review is inappropriate, either because it is giving objectively poor advice, contains an undisclosed security vulnerability, or similar, please open an Issue or contact us (link TBD).

We reserve the right to remove, or not remove, any content submitted to this repository.

Tips

• Read the Review Template for information on which sections can (and must) be included and suggestions for the level of detail expected.
• Watch the Video Introduction (may not be uploaded yet) for more information and to learn more about what is expected in a security review.
• Please see the Wiki for information on topics such as the Disclosure Policy and the PR Review Process.

Disclosure Policy

This platform is not intended to be a vulnerability reporting process, but rather a forum for sharing general security reviews of open source components. If you discover a vulnerability in an open source software component, we strongly encourage you to disclose it privately to the author so as to protect the community.

This platform is also not intended to be a vulnerability disclosure mechanism (i.e. it isn't an alternative to a CVE). If you are the author of a component, we encourage you to publicly disclose the vulnerability, either through the GitHub Security Advisory process, requesting a formal CVE yourself, or another appropriate mechanism.

For reviews that describe or reference vulnerabilities:

• Vulnerabilities must already be disclosed publicly (preferably via a CVE) AND either (a) it must be fixed OR (b) at least 90 days must have passed since it was publicly disclosed. For reviews that don't describe or reference vulnerabilities, all content should be acceptable.

For a more detailed Disclosure Policy that includes examples of acceptable and non-acceptable security reviews, please see the Disclosure Policy page of the Wiki. If you are ever unsure, we encourage you to seek guidance by opening an issue (please do not provide specifics), and a maintainer will advise on the most appropriate course.

Quality Bar

When evaluating whether a submitted review meets the quality bar, maintainers will consider the following:

• Evidence-based: While opinions are allowed, all opinions must be clearly supported by specific evidence. That evidence could be analysis of source code (showing code snippets is recommended), fuzzing results, and so on. The opinions can be positive or negative, but they must be evidence based.

• Credibility: Does the content appear to be credible? For example, if a review just contained the text, "Project X has lots of vulnerabilities. Don't use it", the maintainer should request clarification and expansion of the content until it provides the reader with sufficient information to understand the risk. Such an explanation need not be exhaustive. For "positive" reviews

• Reasonable: Does the content sound reasonable? For example, if there are obvious incorrect assertions or poor advice ("Enable 'strict mode' to prevent SQL Injection attacks", "Switch from HTTPS to HTTP to improve performance"), then the maintainer should request changes, and the conversation should continue within the pull request until it is resolved.

• Not a 0-Day: Does the submission appear to comply with the Disclosure Policy? This essentially means, "does the submission contain a newly-disclosed vulnerability? If the submission appears to violate this policy, it will be closed. The submitter may open an Issue to discuss the matter. If the submission is particularly sensitive, a maintainer may request GitHub perform a "hard delete" of the PR, but we make no guarantee that the content will not be available. Please, reflect on the nature of the content you intend to submit, and ask us if you have any doubts.

It would be infeasible for the reviewer of a pull request to "re-evaluate" the package from the submitted review to "double-check" the work product. As such, submissions by new contributors may be subject to additional scrutiny.

The quality bar is also included in the in the PR Review Process of the Wiki. Please note that this quality bar is subject to change over time.

For more information, view this wiki page.

Motivation

There are two main motivations that led to this project.

First, we weren't aware of any public resources that gave positive indicators about the security quality of open source components. If three organizations were all using the same component, they would consider reviewing the component in some way, wasting effort that could be better directed at other components.

Second, the safety of a component is more than a simple "lack of vulnerabilities". Consider the case of a GUID generator that uses a strong cryptographic function and the current time as part of its algorithm. It's debatable whether this type of design should be considered a vulnerability (as randomness isn't essential when generating GUIDs), but in many cases, developers implicitly assume that an attacker cannot guess what GUID will be generated. In this regard, a security review could state that the GUID generator is specifically not resistent to prediction, which could be of help to a developer trying to identify the best tool for the job.

Objective

The primary objective of this project is to collect and curate security reviews performed against open source software components, and to make these freely available to stakeholders.

Scope

The scope of this project includes any software that is distributed under an open source license.

Prior Work

There are many tangentially-related projects (the NIST CVE database, GitHub Security Advisories, commercial vulnerability databases), and many security researchers make available their own security assessments, but to the best of our knowledge, this project is somewhat unique in its purpose and approach.

Licenses

All reviews here are under a permissive license. Unless stated otherwise, documentation is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0) license, while code is released under the Apache license 2.0 (Apache-2.0). The documentation may link to other materials; those other materials retain their licenses.

Security / vulnerability reporting

For information on how to report vulnerabilities in the software in this repository (e.g., our scripts), see SECURITY.md.

More Information

For more information on this project and the Open Source Security Foundation, please visit https://openssf.org.