Categories

Technology

OSV-Scanner: vulnerabilities with a source of truth

OSV-Scanner is Google's dependency scanner, announced in 2022, that queries the open OSV.dev database rather than raw CVE advisories. Because OSV pins each vulnerability to precise commit or semantic version ranges, matching against your actual dependencies becomes deterministic and produces far less noise. It reads npm, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, Rust and Maven manifests.

Methodologies

VEX: filtering vulnerability noise with context

VEX, the Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange, is a structured way for a vendor to state whether a CVE listed in an SBOM actually affects a product. Log4Shell in December 2021 showed why it exists: countless Java applications carried that critical CVE while never loading the vulnerable class. VEX marks which vulnerabilities are not exploitable, so scanner noise becomes signal.

Technology

Trivy and Grype: Container Image Scanning in CI

Trivy and Grype are the two leading open-source tools for container image scanning in CI/CD pipelines. Both detect CVEs in OS packages and language dependencies with less than 5% coverage difference. Trivy stands out for IaC scanning; Grype natively integrates the SBOM workflow with Syft.