OSV-Scanner

Use OSV-Scanner to find existing vulnerabilities affecting your project's dependencies.

OSV-Scanner provides an officially supported frontend to the OSV database that connects a project’s list of dependencies with the vulnerabilities that affect them. Since the OSV.dev database is open source and distributed, it has several benefits in comparison with closed source advisory databases and scanners:

• Each advisory comes from an open and authoritative source (e.g. the RustSec Advisory Database)
• Anyone can suggest improvements to advisories, resulting in a very high quality database
• The OSV format unambiguously stores information about affected versions in a machine-readable format that precisely maps onto a developer’s list of packages

The above all results in fewer, more actionable vulnerability notifications, which reduces the time needed to resolve them. Check out our announcement blog post for more details!

Table of Contents

• OSV-Scanner
  • Table of Contents
  • Installing
    • Package Managers
    • Install from source
    • SemVer Adherence
  • Usage
    • Scan a directory
    • Input an SBOM
    • Input a lockfile
    • Scanning a Debian based docker image packages (preview)
  • Configure OSV-Scanner
    • Ignore vulnerabilities by ID
  • JSON output
    • Output Format

Installing

You may download the SLSA3 compliant binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows from our releases page.

Package Managers

If you're a Windows Scoop user, then you can install osv-scanner from the official bucket:

scoop install osv-scanner

If you're a Homebrew user, you can install osv-scanner via:

$ brew install osv-scanner

Install from source

Alternatively, you can install this from source by running:

$ go install github.com/google/osv-scanner/cmd/osv-scanner@v1

This requires Go 1.18+ to be installed.

SemVer Adherence

All releases on the same Major version will be guaranteed to have backward compatible JSON output and CLI arguments.

Usage

OSV-Scanner collects a list of dependencies and versions that are used in your project, before matching this list against the OSV database via the OSV.dev API. To build the list of dependencies, you can point OSV-Scanner at your project directory, or manually pass in the path to individual manifest files.

Scan a directory

Walks through a list of directories to find:

• Lockfiles
• SBOMs
• git directories for the latest commit hash

which is used to build the list of dependencies to be matched against OSV vulnerabilities.

Can be configured to recursively walk through subdirectories with the --recursive / -r flag.

Searching for git commit hash is intended to work with projects that use git submodules or a similar mechanism where dependencies are checked out as real git repositories.

Example

$ osv-scanner -r /path/to/your/dir

Input an SBOM

SPDX and CycloneDX SBOMs using Package URLs are supported. The format is auto-detected based on the input file contents.

Example

$ osv-scanner --sbom=/path/to/your/sbom.json

Input a lockfile

A wide range of lockfiles are supported by utilizing this lockfile package. This is the current list of supported lockfiles:

• Cargo.lock
• package-lock.json
• yarn.lock
• pnpm-lock.yaml
• composer.lock
• Gemfile.lock
• go.mod
• mix.lock
• poetry.lock
• pubspec.lock
• pom.xml*
• requirements.txt*
• gradle.lockfile
• buildscript-gradle.lockfile

Example

$ osv-scanner --lockfile=/path/to/your/package-lock.json --lockfile=/path/to/another/Cargo.lock

Scanning a Debian based docker image packages (preview)

This tool will scrape the list of installed packages in a Debian image and query for vulnerabilities on them.

Currently only Debian based docker image scanning is supported.

Requires docker to be installed and the tool to have permission calling it.

This currently does not scan the filesystem of the Docker container, and has various other limitations. Follow this issue for updates on container scanning!

Example

$ osv-scanner --docker image_name:latest

Configure OSV-Scanner

To configure scanning, place an osv-scanner.toml file in the scanned file's directory. To override this osv-scanner.toml file, pass the --config=/path/to/config.toml flag with the path to the configuration you want to apply instead.

Currently, there is only 1 option to configure:

Ignore vulnerabilities by ID

To ignore a vulnerability, enter the ID under the IgnoreVulns key. Optionally, add an expiry date or reason.

Example

[[IgnoredVulns]]
id = "GO-2022-0968"
# ignoreUntil = 2022-11-09 # Optional exception expiry date
reason = "No ssh servers are connected to or hosted in Go lang"

id = "GO-2022-1059"
# ignoreUntil = 2022-11-09 # Optional exception expiry date
reason = "No external http servers are written in Go lang."

JSON output

By default osv-scanner outputs a human readable table. To have osv-scanner output JSON instead, pass the --json flag when calling osv-scanner.

When using the --json flag, only the JSON output will be printed to stdout, with all other outputs being directed to stderr. So to save only the json output to file, you can redirect the output with osv-scanner --json ... > /path/to/file.json

Output Format

{
  "results": [
    {
      "packageSource": {
        "path": "/absolute/path/to/go.mod",
        // One of: lockfile, sbom, git, docker
        "type": "lockfile"
      },
      "packages": [
        {
          "Package": {
            "name": "github.com/gogo/protobuf",
            "version": "1.3.1",
            "ecosystem": "Go"
          },
          "vulnerabilities": [
            {
              "id": "GHSA-c3h9-896r-86jm",
              "aliases": [
                "CVE-2021-3121"
              ],
              // ... Full OSV
            },
            {
              "id": "GO-2021-0053",
              "aliases": [
                "CVE-2021-3121",
                "GHSA-c3h9-896r-86jm"
              ],
              // ... Full OSV
            }
          ],
          // Grouping based on aliases, if two vulnerability share the same alias, or alias each other,
          // they are considered the same vulnerability, and is grouped here under the id field.
          "groups": [
            {
              "ids": [
                "GHSA-c3h9-896r-86jm",
                "GO-2021-0053"
              ]
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "packageSource": {
        "path": "/absolute/path/to/Cargo.lock",
        "type": "lockfile"
      },
      "packages": [
        {
          "Package": {
            "name": "regex",
            "version": "1.5.1",
            "ecosystem": "crates.io"
          },
          "vulnerabilities": [
            {
              "id": "GHSA-m5pq-gvj9-9vr8",
              "aliases": [
                "CVE-2022-24713"
              ],
              // ... Full OSV
            },
            {
              "id": "RUSTSEC-2022-0013",
              "aliases": [
                "CVE-2022-24713"
              ],
              // ... Full OSV
            }
          ],
          "groups": [
            {
              "ids": [
                "GHSA-m5pq-gvj9-9vr8",
                "RUSTSEC-2022-0013"
              ]
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}