It is an interesting time for everyone concerned with open source vulnerabilities. The U.S. Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity requirements for vulnerability disclosure programs and assurances for software used by the US government will go into effect later this year. Finding and fixing security vulnerabilities has never been more important, yet with increasing interest in the area, the vulnerability management space has become fragmented—there are a lot of new tools and competing standards.
In 2021, we announced the launch of OSV, a database of open source vulnerabilities built partially from vulnerabilities found through Google’s OSS-Fuzz program. OSV has grown since then and now includes a widely adopted OpenSSF schema and a vulnerability scanner. In this blog post, we’ll cover how these tools help maintainers track vulnerabilities from discovery to remediation, and how to use OSV together with other SBOM and VEX standards.
The lifecycle of a known vulnerability begins when it is discovered. To reach developers, the vulnerability needs to be added to a database. CVEs are the industry standard for describing vulnerabilities across all software, but there was a lack of an open source centric database. As a result, several independent vulnerability databases exist across different ecosystems.
To address this, we announced the OSV Schema to unify open source vulnerability databases. The schema is machine readable, and is designed so dependencies can be easily matched to vulnerabilities using automation. The OSV Schema remains the only widely adopted schema that treats open source as a first class citizen. Since becoming a part of OpenSSF, the OSV Schema has seen adoption from services like GitHub, ecosystems such as Rust and Python, and linux distributions such as Rocky linux.
Thanks to such wide community adoption of the OSV Schema, OSV.dev is able to provide a distributed vulnerability database and service that pulls from language specific authoritative sources. In total, the OSV.dev database now includes 43,302 vulnerabilities from 16 ecosystems as of March 2023. Users can check OSV for a comprehensive view of all known vulnerabilities in open source.
Every vulnerability in OSV.dev contains package manager versions and git commit hashes, so open source users can easily determine if their packages are impacted because of the familiar style of versioning. Maintainers are also familiar with OSV’s community driven and distributed collaboration on the development of OSV’s database, tools, and schema.
The next step in managing vulnerabilities is to determine project dependencies and their associated vulnerabilities. Last December we released OSV-Scanner, a free, open source tool which scans software projects’ lockfiles, SBOMs, or git repositories to identify vulnerabilities found in the OSV.dev database. When a project is scanned, the user gets a list of all known vulnerabilities in the project.
In the two months since launch, OSV-Scanner has seen positive reception from the community, including over 4,600 stars and 130 PRs from 29 contributors. Thank you to the community, which has been incredibly helpful in identifying bugs, supporting new lockfile formats, and helping us prioritize new features for the tool.
Once a vulnerability has been identified, it needs to be remediated. Removing a vulnerability through upgrading the package is often not as simple as it seems. Sometimes an upgrade will break your project or cause another dependency to not function correctly. These complex dependency graph constraints can be difficult to resolve. We’re currently working on building features in OSV-Scanner to improve this process by suggesting minimal upgrade paths.
Sometimes, it isn’t even necessary to upgrade a package. A vulnerable component may be present in a project, but that doesn’t mean it is exploitable–and VEX statements provide this information to help in prioritization of vulnerability remediation. For example, it may not be necessary to update a vulnerable component if it is never called. In cases like this, a VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) statement can provide this justification.
Manually generating VEX statements is time intensive and complex, requiring deep expertise in the project’s codebase and libraries included in its dependency tree. These costs are barriers to VEX adoption at scale, so we’re working on the ability to auto-generate high quality VEX statements based on static analysis and manual ignore files. The format for this will likely be one or more of the current emerging VEX standards.
Not only are there multiple emerging VEX standards (such as OpenVEX, CycloneDX, and CSAF), there are also multiple advisory formats (CVE, CSAF) and SBOM formats (CycloneDX, SPDX). Compatibility is a concern for project maintainers and open source users throughout the process of identifying and fixing project vulnerabilities. A developer may be obligated to use another standard and wonder if OSV can be used alongside it.
Fortunately, the answer is generally yes! OSV provides a focused, first-class experience for describing open source vulnerabilities, while providing an easy bridge to other standards.
The OSV team has directly worked with the CVE Quality Working Group on a key new feature of the latest CVE 5.0 standard: a new versioning schema that closely resembles OSV’s own versioning schema. This will enable easy conversion from OSV to CVE 5.0, and vice versa. It also enables OSV to contribute high quality metadata directly back to CVE, and drive better machine readability and data quality across the open source ecosystem.
Not all standards will convert as effortlessly as CVE to OSV. Emerging standards like CSAF are comparatively complicated because they support broader use cases. These standards often need to encode affected proprietary software, and CSAF includes rich mechanisms to express complicated nested product trees that are unnecessary for open source. As a result, the spec is roughly six times the size of OSV and difficult to use directly for open source.
OSV Schema's strong adoption shows that the open source community prefers a lightweight standard, tailored for open source. However, the OSV Schema maintains compatibility with CSAF for identification of packages through the Package URL and vers standards. CSAF records that use these mechanisms can be directly converted to OSV, and all OSV entries can be converted to CSAF.
Similarly, all emerging SBOM and VEX standards maintain compatibility with OSV through the Package URL specification. OSV-Scanner today also already provides scanning support for the SPDX and CycloneDX SBOM standards.
OSV already provides straightforward compatibility with established standards such as CVE, SPDX, and CycloneDX. While it’s not clear yet which other emerging SBOM and VEX formats will become the standard, OSV has a clear path to supporting all of them. Open source developers and ecosystems will likely find OSV to be convenient for recording and consuming vulnerability information given OSV’s focused, minimal design.
OSV is not just built for open source, it is an open source project. We desire to build tools that will easily fit into your workflow and will help you identify and fix vulnerabilities in your projects. Your input, through contributions, questions, and feedback, is very valuable to us as we work towards that goal. Questions can be asked by opening an issue and all of our projects (OSV.dev, OSV-Scanner, OSV-Schema) welcome contributors.
Want to keep up with the latest OSV developments? We’ve just launched a project blog! Check out our first major post, all about how VEX could work at scale.
Starting in Chrome 111 we will begin to turn down the Chrome Cleanup Tool, an application distributed to Chrome users on Windows to help find and remove unwanted software (UwS).
The Chrome Cleanup Tool was introduced in 2015 to help users recover from unexpected settings changes, and to detect and remove unwanted software. To date, it has performed more than 80 million cleanups, helping to pave the way for a cleaner, safer web.
In recent years, several factors have led us to reevaluate the need for this application to keep Chrome users on Windows safe.
First, the user perspective – Chrome user complaints about UwS have continued to fall over the years, averaging out to around 3% of total complaints in the past year. Commensurate with this, we have observed a steady decline in UwS findings on users' machines. For example, last month just 0.06% of Chrome Cleanup Tool scans run by users detected known UwS.
Next, several positive changes in the platform ecosystem have contributed to a more proactive safety stance than a reactive one. For example, Google Safe Browsing as well as antivirus software both block file-based UwS more effectively now, which was originally the goal of the Chrome Cleanup Tool. Where file-based UwS migrated over to extensions, our substantial investments in the Chrome Web Store review process have helped catch malicious extensions that violate the Chrome Web Store's policies.
Finally, we've observed changing trends in the malware space with techniques such as Cookie Theft on the rise – as such, we've doubled down on defenses against such malware via a variety of improvements including hardened authentication workflows and advanced heuristics for blocking phishing and social engineering emails, malware landing pages, and downloads.
Starting in Chrome 111, users will no longer be able to request a Chrome Cleanup Tool scan through Safety Check or leverage the "Reset settings and cleanup" option offered in chrome://settings on Windows. Chrome will also remove the component that periodically scans Windows machines and prompts users for cleanup should it find anything suspicious.
Even without the Chrome Cleanup Tool, users are automatically protected by Safe Browsing in Chrome. Users also have the option to turn on Enhanced protection by navigating to chrome://settings/security – this mode substantially increases protection from dangerous websites and downloads by sharing real-time data with Safe Browsing.
While we'll miss the Chrome Cleanup Tool, we wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge its role in combating UwS for the past 8 years. We'll continue to monitor user feedback and trends in the malware ecosystem, and when adversaries adapt their techniques again – which they will – we'll be at the ready.
As always, please feel free to send us feedback or find us on Twitter @googlechrome.
Your journey towards keeping your Google Workspace users and data safe, starts with bringing your Chrome browsers under Cloud Management at no additional cost. Chrome Browser Cloud Management is a single destination for applying Chrome Browser policies and security controls across Windows, Mac, linux, iOS and Android. You also get deep visibility into your browser fleet including which browsers are out of date, which extensions your users are using and bringing insight to potential security blindspots in your enterprise.
Managing Chrome from the cloud allows Google Workspace admins to enforce enterprise protections and policies to the whole browser on fully managed devices, which no longer requires a user to sign into Chrome to have policies enforced. You can also enforce policies that apply when your managed users sign in to Chrome browser on any Windows, Mac, or linux computer (via Chrome Browser user-level management) --not just on corporate managed devices.
This enables you to keep your corporate data and users safe, whether they are accessing work resources from fully managed, personal, or unmanaged devices used by your vendors.
Getting started is easy. If your organization hasn’t already, check out this guide for steps on how to enroll your devices.
Chrome uses Google’s Safe Browsing technology to help protect billions of devices every day by showing warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files. Safe Browsing is enabled by default for all users when they download Chrome. As an administrator, you can prevent your users from disabling Safe Browsing by enforcing the SafeBrowsingProtectionLevel policy.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen threats on the web becoming increasingly sophisticated. Turning on Enhanced Safe Browsing will substantially increase protection from dangerous websites, malicious downloads and extensions. For the best protections against web based attacks Google has to offer, enforce Enhanced Safe Browsing for your users.
Enterprise password reuse introduces significant security risks. Quite often, employees reuse corporate credentials as personal logins and vice versa. Occasionally, employees even enter their corporate passwords into phishing websites. Reused employee logins give criminals easy paths to access corporate data.
Chrome Enterprise Password Reuse detection helps enterprises avoid identity theft and employee and organizational data breaches by detecting when an employee enters their corporate credentials into any other website.
Google Password Manager in Chrome also has a built-in Password Checkup feature that alerts users when Google discovers a username and password has been exposed in a public data breach.
Password alerts are surfaced in Audit Logs and Security Investigation Tool which helps admins create automated rules or take appropriate steps to mitigate this by asking users to reset their passwords.
IT teams can gain useful insights about potential security threats and events that your Google Workspace users are encountering when browsing the web using Chrome. IT teams can take preventive measures against threats through Security Reporting.
In the Google Workspace Admin console, organizations can enroll their Chrome browser and get detailed information about their browser deployment. IT teams can also set policies, manage extensions, and more. The Chrome management policies can be set to work alongside any end user-based policies that may be in place.
Once you’ve enabled Security events reporting (pictured above), you can then view reporting events within audit logs. Google Workspace Enterprise Plus or Education Plus users can use the Workspace Security Investigation Tool to identify, triage, and act on potential security threats.
As of today, Chrome can report on when users:
In addition to Google Workspace, you can also export these events into other Google Cloud products, such as Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Chronicle, or leading 3rd party products such as Splunk, Crowdstrike and PaloAlto Networks.
Modern web browsers, like any other software, can have "zero day" vulnerabilities, which are undiscovered flaws in the software that can be exploited by attackers until they are identified and resolved. Fortunately, among all the browsers, Chrome is known to patch zero day vulnerabilities quickly. However, to take advantage of this, the IT team has to ensure that all browsers within the browser environment are up-to-date. Our enterprise tools provide a smooth and seamless browser update process, enabling user productivity while maintaining optimal security. By leveraging these tools, businesses can ensure their users are safe and protected from potential security threats.
Extensions pose a large security risk. Many extensions request powerful permissions that if misused, could lead to security breaches or data loss. However, due to strong end user demand, it’s often not possible to fully block the installation of extensions.
Context-Aware Access ensures only the right people, under the right conditions, access confidential information. Using Context-Aware Access, you can create granular access control policies for apps that access Workspace data based on attributes, such as user identity, location, device security status, and IP address.
To ensure that your Google Workspace resources are only accessed from managed Chrome browsers with protection enabled, you create custom access levels in Advanced mode, using Common Expressions Language (CEL). Learn more about managed queries in this help center article.
Learn more about how Google supports today’s workforce with secure enterprise browsing here.
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