syft VS dependency-track

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.

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