dependency-track VS DependencyCheck

I've become interested in SBOM recently, and found there were great tools like https://dependencytrack.org/ for CycloneDX SBOMs, but all I have is SPDX SBOMs generated by GitHub.

I decided to have a go at writing my own dependency track esque tool aiming to integrate with the APIs GitHub provides.

It's pretty limited in functionality so far, but can give a high level summary of the types of licenses your repository dependencies use, and let you drill down into potentially problematic ones.

Written in NextJS + mui + sqlite, and using another project of mine to generate most of the API boilerplate/glue (https://github.com/mnahkies/openapi-code-generator)

To detect these types of vulnerabilities, we should first and foremost know our dependencies and versions, and which of them have vulnerabilities. The OWASP Top 10 2021 identifies this need as A06:2021-Vulnerable and Outdated Components. OWASP has several tools for this, including Dependency Check and Dependency Track. These tools will warn about the use of components with vulnerabilities.

https://dependencytrack.org/

You just need to use one of the various tools out there to scan.

OWASP Dependency Track - https://dependencytrack.org/

Dependency-Track

I actually want to build the same thing you are after, and I think I’ll go for the setup you describe in idea 2. The tool you can use for this is Trivy (https://trivy.dev), have it generate a SBOM and send it to Dependencytrack (https://dependencytrack.org).

If you like Dependency-Track, consider moving to Dependency-Track ( https://dependencytrack.org ), which makes administration much easier.

Even if you roll up the sleeves and add the feature yourself there is no guarantee it will be accepted upstream and you should always be prepared for the possibility of wasting time.

I don't quite understand the deployment issue. I mean, I understand people might not be tracking what's deployed, but I don't understand what is missing for it to be happening today, other than will.

For example: I build some software into a Docker image, version tag it, sign it, and generate an SBOM for it. That image goes into production with signature validation. Even if I've included 100 jar files in there, I should know exactly which ones I have. I can upload the SBOM to my DependencyTrack[1] instance to so over time no dependencies have vulnerabilities I'm not aware of.

What doesn't work in that scenario? What scenarios can't conform to that one?

[1] https://dependencytrack.org

Use Security Tools: To identify known vulnerabilities in your project's dependencies, you can utilize commands like npm audit or employ third-party security scanners such as DependencyCheck or Dependabot. These tools thoroughly analyze the dependency tree and offer actionable insights to assist you in resolving any identified vulnerabilities.

OWASP DependencyCheck - a really decent tool for scanning your project for vulnerable dependencies. It is actively developed and updated and up to date with the most latest vulnerabilities. Sometimes it can be a pain in the ass, though. Some security researchers and such find a vulnerability, publish it and the next day our CI/CD pipelines fail (the dependency check build step prevents the code from going to production). And not always there is a fix available. So, some vulnerabilities have to be ignored, temporarily. Also, to be able to ignore a vulnerability one has to do a fast risk assessment. And that will require from him to read about the vulnerability and decide if it is safe to be ignored or some different workaround must be found.

The ultimate guide somehow fails to mention the best CVE checker: https://github.com/jeremylong/DependencyCheck

We run https://github.com/jeremylong/DependencyCheck over our dependency tree regularly, via this Clojure wrapper: https://github.com/clj-holmes/clj-watson which tells us the dependency tree path to each item that has a CVE and also the version in which the CVE is addressed, if known.

We use OWASP dependency-check and pass reports to SonarQube.

From OWASP for those class of tools you could look into DependencyCheck and DependencyTrack

DependencyCheck is an open source tool that checks for vulnerabilities in dependencies used within a project. While it is a reactive tool, it's an important one since the code a developer writes is not the only code an application uses.

One more aspect to consider, although I know it is not the primary ask of the post, is to be sure and run something like dependency check on your repository. There are quite a few vulnerabilities being injected through the packaging process these days.