log4j_checker_beta VS syft

Coordinating an effective response was challenging for most if not all of the organizations affected, and at Reddit we saw firsthand how amazing people will come together in a situation. Internally, we needed to work together across teams quickly, but this was also an internet-wide situation, so while we were working on things here, we were also seeing how the ecosystem itself was mobilized. For example, we were able to swiftly scale up our response by scouring public forums where others were dealing with these same issues, devoting personnel to understanding and implementing those learnings, and using ad-hoc scanning tools (e.g. a fleet-wide Ansible playbook execution of an rubo77's log4j checker and Anchore’s tool Syft) to ensure our reports were accurate. Thanks to our quick responders and collaboration with our colleagues across the industry, we were able to address the vulnerability while it was still just a bug to be patched, before it turned into something worse. It was inspiring to see how defenders connected with each other on Reddit (oh yeah, plenty of memes and threads were generated) and elsewhere on the internet, and we learned a lot both about how we might tune up our security capabilities & response processes, but also about how we might leverage community and connections to improve security across the industry. In addition, we continue to grow our internal community of folks protecting Reddit (btw, we’re hiring!) to scale up to meet the next challenge that comes our way.

https://github.com/rubo77/log4j_checker_beta has a nice script to check packages, JARS, etc. for log4j libraries... It will not tell you what versions are and aren't vulnerable... Just if log4j is on your system. i.e. I have log4j-core/2.13.1 in a repository I need to either get rid of or update.

Syft is a popular open source CLI tool created by Anchore for generating an SBOM from container images and filesystems. It’s designed to provide a catalog of dependencies for other tools to use as a data source. It supports many popular programming languages, package managers, and container image formats.

Inside of the SBOMs, we can detect a lot: https://github.com/anchore/syft#supported-ecosystems

You're right that the active/dormant detection needs to be customized per type of runtime. We cover rpm/deb, python and java with the node and others coming very soon. The compiled languages will be our main focus next. For example, Go binaries embed some dependency metadata in the binary itself.

Also related to this effort is the "in-toto" integrity chain: https://in-toto.io/in-toto/ Since we're already connecting build to run, we aim to complete the chain.

Installing syft is pretty straight forward. On any Linux/Mac environment you can run the following command to install

The data format is supported by cargo audit, Syft and Trivy. Reading it from your own tools is also very easy.

A Software-Bill-of-Materials (SBOM) lists all the software components included in an image. Buildpacks support SBOMs in CycloneDX, Syft and SPDX formats.

I think you can already do that using Syft.

I'll continue relying on Anitya for the feed and syft/grype to build my SBOM and track vulnerabilities.

Today corporations, open source projects, nonprofit foundations, and even governments are all trying to figure out how to improve the global software supply chain security. While these efforts are more than welcome, for the moment, there is hardly any straightforward way for organizations to improve on that front.

Syft is a popular open source tool that generates SBOMs for software applications and also containers. You can execute it manually and include the generated artifacts into your release, but you can also automate the process using a GitHub Action that will be triggered whenever you have a new release on your repository.