dependency-track VS OPA (Open Policy Agent)

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 The OWASP Top 10 2021 identifies this need as A06:2021-Vulnerable and Outdated Components.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

How can we handle this? Are there any mechanisms to prevent or at least to some extent safeguard this kind of issues without falling back to a manual workflow? There is. One huge advantage of sticking to (de-facto) standards like Terraform is that first we are probably not the first ones to come up with this question and second there is a huge ecosystem around Terraform that might help us with such challenges. And for this specific scenario the solution is the Open Policy Agent. Let us take a closer look how the solution could look like.

A popular Policy-as-Code tool for Terraform is OPA, everyone's favorite versatile open-source policy engine that enforces security and compliance policies across your cloud-native stack, making it easier to manage and maintain consistent policy enforcement in complex, multi-service environments.

Harness Policy As Code uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the central service to store and enforce policies for the different entities and processes across the Harness platform. In this section, you will define a policy that will deny a pipeline execution if there is no approval step defined in a deployment stage.

OPA: While OPA is an open-source, general-purpose policy engine capable of enforcing unified and context-aware policies throughout the stack, it can also accept and output data in formats such as JSON, effectively functioning as a tool for generating or modifying configurations. Although it does not provide out-of-the-box schema definition support, it allows the integration of JsonSchema definitions.

In essence, container image signing involves adding a digital stamp to an image, affirming its authenticity. This digital assurance guarantees that the image is unchanged from creation to deployment. In this blog, I'll explain how to sign container images for Kubernetes using Cosign and the Open Policy Agent. I will also share a tutorial that demonstrates these concepts.

In this post we will explores two powerful solutions for addressing this issue: the Open Policy Language (OPA) and Google’s Zanzibar.

Rego is a declarative query language from the makers of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted OPA as an incubation-level hosted project in April 2019, and OPA graduated from incubating status in 2021.

Now there are more subdivided practice: * Policy as Code: Sentinel, OPA * Database as Code: bytebase * AppConfiguration as Code: KusionStack, Acorn * ...... (Welcome to add more)