nvd-clojure

Formerly known as lein-nvd

National Vulnerability Database dependency checker tool.

For a given project, all the .jar files from its classpath will be checked for known security vulnerabilities. nvd-clojure passes them to a library called DependencyCheck which does the vulnerability analysis. Quoting the README from that library:

DependencyCheck 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 consisting of [nvd-clojure/nvd-clojure "3.2.0"]. Said project can be located inside the targeted repo's Git repository.

(defproject nvd-helper "local"
  :description "nvd-clojure helper project"
  :dependencies [[nvd-clojure "3.2.0"]
                 [org.clojure/clojure "1.11.1"]]
  :jvm-opts ["-Dclojure.main.report=stderr"])

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 "nvd-clojure.edn" "$(cd <YOUR_PROJECT>; lein with-profile -user,-dev classpath)"

The first argument denotes a .edn file with extra options (example, doc). You can pass an empty string "" to mean "please use the default filename" (which is nvd-clojure.edn). If this file didn't exist, it will be automatically created for you, with some useful contents and comments.

The classpath Leiningen 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-monolith), you should ensure that each module is included in this classpath; else they will not be analysed.

Clojure CLI

Please create a separate project consisting exclusively of nvd-clojure/nvd-clojure {:mvn/version "3.2.0"}. 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, at your own risk.

Then you can run, within this helper project:

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

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)\"" :config-filename \""nvd-config.edn\""

The :config-filename argument denotes an .edn file with extra options (example, doc). If this file didn't exist, it will be automatically created for you, with some useful contents and comments.

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:

clojure -J-Dclojure.main.report=stderr -Tnvd nvd.task/check :classpath \""$(cd example; lein with-profile -user classpath)\""

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:

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:

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.

(Note that that is only one of the multiple ways of remediating a given vulnerability, please see FAQ)

Configuration

The default settings for nvd-clojure are usually sufficient for most projects, but can be customized with an .edn 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.

When invoking it via Clojure Tools, it must be passed as a :config-filename option, e.g.

clojure -Tnvd nvd.task/check :classpath \""$(clojure -Spath)\"" :config-filename \""nvd-config.edn\""

Note the escaped double quotes around the filename, to ensure that Clojure reads the command line argument as a string, not a symbol.

Configuration options

There are many DependencyCheck 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 DependencyCheck 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
- Allows for CVEs to be permanently or temporarily suppressed.
- See DependencyCheck documentation for the XML file format.
- If a nvd-clojure.edn file was automatically generated for you, then this file will also be automatically generated (and enabled) for you.
: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.

Logging

You can override the default logging behaviour by providing a simplelogger.properties file on the nvd-clojure classpath. Note that this is not the classpath of your project. See resources/simplelogger.properties for the default config.

You can also set logging properties directly through Java system properties (the -D flags), for example:

clojure -J-Dclojure.main.report=stderr -J-Dorg.slf4j.simpleLogger.log.org.apache.commons=error -Tnvd nvd.task/check # ...

FAQ

Attribution

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

References

License

The MIT License (MIT)

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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