project "KB"

Project KB supports the creation, management and aggregation of a distributed, collaborative knowledge base of vulnerabilities that affect open-source software.

This repository contains a vulnerability knowledge-base as well as set of tools to support its creation and management.

Additionally, the MSR2019 folder contains the package associated with the paper we published at the Mining Software Repository conference in 2019 (see below).

Why this project

In order to feed Eclipse Steady with fresh data, we have spent a considerable amount of time, in the past few years, mining and curating a knowledge base of vulnerabilities that affect open-source components. We know that other parties have been doing the same, in academia as well as in the industry. From this experience, we have learnt that with the growing size of open source ecosystems and the pace at which new vulnerabilities are discovered, the old approach cannot scale. We are also more and more convinced that vulnerability knowledge-bases about open-source should be open-source themselves and adopt the same community-oriented model that governs the rest of the open-source ecosystem.

These considerations have pushed us to release our vulnerability knowledge base in early 2019. In June 2020, we made a further step releasing the kaybee tool support to make the creation, aggregation, and consumption of vulnerability data much easier. In late 2020, we also released, as a proof-of-concept, the prototype prospector, whose goal is to automate the mapping of vulnerability advisories onto their fix-commits. A technical description of the approach we implemented in prospector can be found in this preprint. As of April 2021, together with our partners in the EU-funded project AssureMOSS, we are reimplementing prospector to make it more robust, scalable, and user-friendly. The reimplementation is carried out in the dedicate branch prospector-assuremoss.

We hope this will encourage more contributors to join our efforts to build a collaborative, comprehensive knowledge base where each party remains in control of the data they produce and of how they aggregate and consume data from the other sources.

What can project "KB" be used for, in practice

(work in progress)

Project "KB" consists essentially of two things: a toolkit and a knowledge base.

The toolkit comprises:

• kaybee, a tool to:
  • create vulnerability statements; a vulnerability statement is a plain-text file in yaml format that contains data about a given vulnerability, such as the commits that provide a fix for it, a set of notes and references to related Web pages, a list of open-source components that are directly affected by the vulnerability at hand, and so on.
  • fetch vulnerability statements from one or more remote sources (git repositories)
  • merge the content of multiple sources of statements, based on a conflict resolution policy
  • export the result of the merge operation to a variety of different formats
• prospector, a research prototype to help map vulnerability advisories onto the commits that contain fixes for those vulnerabilities.

The knowledge base, offers a set of vulnerability statements that can be consumed using the kaybee tool.

Getting started

Installing the kaybee tool

With kaybee it is possible to fetch the vulnerability statements from this repository (or from any other repository) and export them to a number of formats, including a script to import them to a Steady backend.

There is nothing to install actually, just download a binary compatible with your operating system, make sure it has execution permissions if applicable, and then run it.

Optionally, for your convenience, you may want to make sure that the binary is in your $PATH.

For example, in Linux you would put the following line in your .bashrc file:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/kaybee

(please, make sure you adjust the path to the kaybee binary as necessary)

Alternatively, you can clone this repository and build it yourself (you will need go and make). You can do so with the make command; inspecting the Makefile first is a good idea.

Usage

Once you have downloaded or built the binary, you can see the list of supported commands with:

kaybee --help

Documentation

Please check out the project "KB" home page.

Importing vulnerability data in Eclipse Steady

Run the following command:

kaybee pull

This will retrieve all the statements from all the sources configured in your kaybeeconf.yaml file.

You can then run:

kaybee export --target steady

to generate a script steady.sh; edit the top of the script to indicate the URL of your Steady backend and change the other variables as you see fit (there are comments in the file to guide you), then run it.

Publications

In early 2019, a snapshot of the knowlege base from project "KB" was described in:

• Serena E. Ponta, Henrik Plate, Antonino Sabetta, Michele Bezzi, Cédric Dangremont, A Manually-Curated Dataset of Fixes to Vulnerabilities of Open-Source Software, MSR, 2019

If you use the dataset for your research work, please cite it as:

@inproceedings{ponta2019msr,
    author={Serena E. Ponta and Henrik Plate and Antonino Sabetta and Michele Bezzi and
    C´edric Dangremont},
    title={A Manually-Curated Dataset of Fixes to Vulnerabilities of Open-Source Software},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories},
    year=2019,
    month=May,
}

MSR 2019 DATA SHOWCASE SUBMISSION: please find here the data and the scripts described in that paper

Credits

EU-funded research projects

The development of Project KB is partly supported by the following EU-funded projects:

• Sparta (Grant No.830892).
• AssureMOSS (Grant No.952647).

3rd party vulnerability data sources

3rd party information from NVD and MITRE might have been used as input for compiling parts of this knowledge base. See MITRE's Terms of Use for more information. See also this notice.

Requirements

None, the kaybee binary is self-contained. Binary versions for Windows, Linux, MacOS are available for download.

Limitations and Known Issues

This project is work-in-progress. The vulnerability knowledge base only contains information about vulnerabilities in Java and Python open source components.

The list of current issues is available here.

Feel free to open a new issue if you think you found a bug or if you have a feature request.

How to obtain support

For the time being, please use GitHub issues both to report bugs and to request help. Documentation and better support channels will come soon.

Contributing

See here.