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nvd-clojure

Formerly known as lein-nvd

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National Vulnerability Database dependency checker library.

When run in your project, all the JARs on the classpath will be checked for known security vulnerabilities. nvd-clojure extracts project dependencies and passes them to a library called Dependency-Check which does the vulnerability analysis. Quoting the README for that library:

Dependency-Check is a utility that attempts to detect publicly disclosed vulnerabilities contained within project dependencies. It does this by determining if there is a Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) identifier for a given dependency. If found, it will generate a report linking to the associated CVE entries.

Installation and basic usage

Please see also: Avoiding classpath interference

Leiningen

Please create a separate project containing exclusively of [nvd-clojure/nvd-clojure "2.0.0"]. Said project can be located inside the targeted repo's Git repository.

Please do not add nvd-clojure as a dependency or plugin in the project.clj of the project to be analysed.

Then you can run, within this helper project:

lein with-profile -user run -m nvd.task.check "" "$(cd <YOUR_PROJECT>; lein with-profile -user,-dev classpath)"

An empty string is passed as the first argument, for backwards compatibility reasons. You can also pass a filename instead, denoting a .json file with extra options (example).

The classpath command should reflect a production-like classpath as closely as possible: it should not include dev/test tooling, plugins, etc.

If you are using a multi-modules solution (e.g. lein-sub, lein-monolith, trapperkeeper), you should ensure that each module is included in this classpath; else they will not be analysed.

Clojure CLI

Please create a separate project containing exclusively of nvd-clojure/nvd-clojure {:mvn/version "2.0.0"}. Said project can be located inside the targeted repo's Git repository.

Please do not add nvd-clojure as a dependency in the deps.edn of the project to be analysed.

You can accomplish something similar with user-level aliases, or with the :replace-deps option.

Then you can run, within this helper project:

clojure -Dclojure.main.report=stderr -m nvd.task.check "" "$(cd <YOUR_PROJECT>; clojure -Spath -A:any:aliases)"

An empty string is passed as the first argument, for backwards compatibility reasons. You can also pass a filename instead, denoting a .json file with extra options (example).

The -Spath command should reflect a production-like classpath as closely as possible: it should not include dev/test tooling, etc.

If you are using a multi-modules solution (e.g. Polylith), you should ensure that each module is included in this classpath; else they will not be analysed.

Clojure CLI Tool

If you have CLI version 1.10.3.933 or later, you can also install nvd-clojure as a "tool":

clojure -Ttools install nvd-clojure/nvd-clojure '{:mvn/version "RELEASE"}' :as nvd

Then you can run:

clojure -J-Dclojure.main.report=stderr -Tnvd nvd.task/check :classpath '"'"$(clojure -Spath -A:any:aliases)"'"'

You can optionally pass a :config-filename, denoting a .json file with extra options (example).

The -Spath command should reflect a production-like classpath as closely as possible: it should not include dev/test tooling, etc.

If you are using a multi-modules solution (e.g. Polylith), you should ensure that each module is included in this classpath; else they will not be analysed.

Usage overview

Run the program as indicated in the previous section. The first time it runs, it will download (and cache) various databases from https://nvd.nist.gov. Subsequent runs will periodically check and update the local database, but the initial run could therefore be quite slow - of the order of ten minutes or more, so give it time.

On completion, a summary table is output to the console, and a suite of reports will be produced in the project's ./target/nvd/ directory. If vulnerabilities are detected, then the check process will exit abnormally, thereby causing any CI build environment to error. (This behaviour can be overriden by setting a :fail-threshold in the project configuration).

Example

There is an example project which has dependencies with known vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-3720, CVE-2015-5262, CVE-2014-3577). This can be demonstrated by running the following:

$ cd example
$ lein nvd check

This will download the NVD database, and then cross-check the classpath dependencies against known vulnerabilities. The following summary report will be displayed on the console:

summary-report

Note that as there were some vulnerabilities detected, the process was aborted, with error code -1 hence the reported subprocess failed message.

More detailed reports (both HTML & XML) are written into the ./example/target/nvd/ directory as follows:


detail-report

Upgrading dependencies

You may use the built-in dependency tree reporters to find out what the dependency relationships are:

$ lein deps :tree # for Leiningen
$ clojure -Stree # for deps.edn

...make sure to use aliases/profiles in such a way that reflects the production classpath.

antq will traverse your project dependencies, and suggest upgraded versions, and can optionally be configured to update the project file.

Configuration options

The default settings for nvd-clojure are usually sufficient for most projects, but can be customized by adding an :nvd { ... } section in your project.clj.

These options can also be expressed as the keys in a .json config file (example). The filename denoting that file is the first argument to be passed to nvd-clojure when invoking it as a main (-m) program. The keys must reside inside a "nvd": {...} entry, not at the top-level.

There are many dependency-check settings (for example to connect via a proxy, or to specify an alternative to the H2 database). The exact settings can be seen in the config.clj source file and cross-referenced to the dependency-check wiki.

There are some specific settings below which are worthy of a few comments:

  • :fail-threshold default value 0; checks the highest CVSS score across all dependencies, and fails if this threshold is breached.
    • As CVSS score ranges from 0..10, the default value will cause a build to fail even for the lowest rated vulnerability.
    • Set to 11 if you never want the build to fail.
  • :data-directory default value is the data dir of DependencyCheck, e.g. ~/.m2/repository/org/owasp/dependency-check-utils/3.2.1/data/
    • It shouldn't normally be necessary to change this
  • :suppression-file default unset
  • :verbose-summary default false
    • When set to true, the summary table includes a severity determination for all dependencies.
    • When set to false, the summary table includes only packages that have either low or high severity determination.
  • :output-dir default value target/nvd/: the directory to save reports into
  • :throw-if-check-unsuccessful? - makes the program exit by throwing an exception instead of by invoking System/exit.
    • This can ease certain usages.

Avoiding classpath interference

nvd-clojure has some Java dependencies, which in turn can have CVEs themselves.

Likewise, a given project's dependencies can overlap and therefore affect nvd-clojure's, leading it to incorrect functionining.

For these reasons, it is strongly advised to follow the installation/usage instructions carefully.

Attribution

nvd-clojure uses Jeremy Long's Dependency-Check library to do the heavy lifting.

References

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016-21 Richard Hull

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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