Formerly known as lein-nvd

National Vulnerability Database dependency checker tool.

For a given project, all the .jar files from its classpath will be checked for known security vulnerabilities. nvd-clojure passes them to a library called DependencyCheck which does the vulnerability analysis. Quoting the README from that library:

DependencyCheck is a utility that attempts to detect publicly disclosed vulnerabilities contained within project dependencies. It does this by determining if there is a Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) identifier for a given dependency. If found, it will generate a report linking to the associated CVE entries.

Please see also: Avoiding classpath interference

(defproject nvd-helper "local"
  :description "nvd-clojure helper project"
  :dependencies [[nvd-clojure "4.0.0"]
                 [org.clojure/clojure "1.11.1"]]
  :jvm-opts ["-Dclojure.main.report=stderr"])

lein with-profile -user run -m nvd.task.check "nvd-clojure.edn" "$(cd <YOUR_PROJECT>; lein with-profile -user,-dev classpath)"

clojure -J-Dclojure.main.report=stderr -M -m nvd.task.check "nvd-clojure.edn" "$(cd <YOUR_PROJECT>; clojure -Spath -A:any:aliases)"

clojure -Ttools install nvd-clojure/nvd-clojure '{:mvn/version "RELEASE"}' :as nvd

clojure -J-Dclojure.main.report=stderr -Tnvd nvd.task/check :classpath \""$(clojure -Spath -A:any:aliases)\"" :config-filename \""nvd-config.edn\""

Run the program as indicated in the previous section. The first time it runs, it will download (and cache) various databases from https://nvd.nist.gov. Subsequent runs will periodically check and update the local database, but the initial run could therefore be quite slow - of the order of ten minutes or more, so give it time.

On completion, a summary table is output to the console, and a suite of reports will be produced in the project's ./target/nvd/ directory. If vulnerabilities are detected, then the check process will exit abnormally, thereby causing any CI build environment to error. (This behaviour can be overriden by setting a :fail-threshold in the project configuration).

There is an example project which has dependencies with known vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-3720, CVE-2015-5262, CVE-2014-3577).

This can be demonstrated by running the following:

clojure -J-Dclojure.main.report=stderr -Tnvd nvd.task/check :classpath \""$(cd example; lein with-profile -user classpath)\""

This will download the NVD database, and then cross-check the classpath dependencies against known vulnerabilities. The following summary report will be displayed on the console:

Note that as there were some vulnerabilities detected, the process was aborted, with error code -1 hence the reported subprocess failed message.

More detailed reports (both HTML & XML) are written into the ./example/target/nvd/ directory as follows:

You may use the built-in dependency tree reporters to find out what the dependency relationships are:

$ lein deps :tree # for Leiningen
$ clojure -Stree # for deps.edn

...make sure to use aliases/profiles in such a way that reflects the production classpath.

antq will traverse your project dependencies, and suggest upgraded versions, and can optionally be configured to update the project file.

(Note that that is only one of the multiple ways of remediating a given vulnerability, please see FAQ)

The default settings for nvd-clojure are usually sufficient for most projects, but can be customized with an .edn config file (example). The filename denoting that file is the first argument to be passed to nvd-clojure when invoking it as a main (-m) program.

When invoking it via Clojure Tools, it must be passed as a :config-filename option, e.g.

clojure -Tnvd nvd.task/check :classpath \""$(clojure -Spath)\"" :config-filename \""nvd-config.edn\""

Note the escaped double quotes around the filename, to ensure that Clojure reads the command line argument as a string, not a symbol.

There are many DependencyCheck settings (for example to connect via a proxy, or to specify an alternative to the H2 database). The exact settings can be seen in the config.clj source file and cross-referenced to the DependencyCheck wiki.

There are some specific settings below which are worthy of a few comments:

• :nvd-api - map of:
  • :key - MANDATORY (unless you set an NVD_API_TOKEN environment variable) - must contain an API key that you can obtain in https://nvd.nist.gov/developers/request-an-api-key
  • other keys: :endpoint, :delay, :max-retry-count, :valid-for-hours, :datafeed - advanced, please refer to the source code.
• :fail-threshold default value 0; checks the highest CVSS score across all dependencies, and fails if this threshold is breached.
  • As CVSS score ranges from 0..10, the default value will cause a build to fail even for the lowest rated vulnerability.
  • Set to 11 if you never want the build to fail.
• :data-directory default value is the data dir of DependencyCheck, e.g. ~/.m2/repository/org/owasp/dependency-check-utils/3.2.1/data/
  • It shouldn't normally be necessary to change this
• :suppression-file default unset
  • Allows for CVEs to be permanently or temporarily suppressed.
  • See DependencyCheck documentation for the XML file format.
  • If a nvd-clojure.edn file was automatically generated for you, then this file will also be automatically generated (and enabled) for you.
• :verbose-summary default false
  • When set to true, the summary table includes a severity determination for all dependencies.
  • When set to false, the summary table includes only packages that have either low or high severity determination.
• :output-dir default value target/nvd/: the directory to save reports into
• :throw-if-check-unsuccessful - makes the program exit by throwing an exception instead of by invoking System/exit.
  • This can ease certain usages.

You can override the default logging behaviour by providing a simplelogger.properties file on the nvd-clojure classpath. Note that this is not the classpath of your project. See resources/simplelogger.properties for the default config.

You can also set logging properties directly through Java system properties (the -D flags), for example:

clojure -J-Dclojure.main.report=stderr -J-Dorg.slf4j.simpleLogger.log.org.apache.commons=error -Tnvd nvd.task/check # ...

nvd-clojure uses Jeremy Long's DependencyCheck library to do the heavy lifting.

• https://nvd.nist.gov/
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Dependency_Check
• https://github.com/jeremylong/DependencyCheck
• https://github.com/liquidz/antq

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016-23 Richard Hull

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

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