gradle-bodyguard 0.0.3

A tool that scans dependencies in your Gradle project and warns you about potential security issues

Gradle Bodyguard

What is this?

Complete blog post to come. Stay tunned!

Supply chain attacks are a reality and the JVM ecosystem is not imune.

There are several tools out there that help developers from JVM-based languages to counter measure against supply chain attacks - like Dependabot, Synk, DependencyCheck - and others. But when talking particularly about Gradle project things start to become a little more tricky, because (but only) :

• We are instered not only in the dependencies that our project declares, but also in the transitive ones (actually, transitive dependencies are the main attack vector here);

• Is quite common that Gradle projects - specially multi-module ones - manage dependencies either with Project extension API or with buildSrc. In the two cases, tools like Dependabot - which parses your Gradle files in order to figure out dependencies - get confused or eventually don't find the dependencies;

• Gradle plugins for such type of tools eventually are available, but this means another plugin in your Gradle build;

• OWASP DependencyCheck is quite trick to be used in Android projects.

gradle-bodyguard was born to tackle these issues. Written in Python and running as a CLI tool, it requires no additional plugins in your project and exercises your Gradle build - either root project only or multi-module one, regarless dependencies managed with buildSrc - and learns about the dependencies that Gradle already knows about your project, even the transitive ones.

gradle-bodyguard match these artifacts against OSS Index and outputs the results for you. In this way, you can learn (and automate around) when some dependency introduces a new disclosed CVE in your build, particularly at CI level.

Because OSSIndex is free to use, this tool is free of charge as well. 😎

Setup

Install with pip. Requires Python 3.8.+ or newer installed in your machine.

→ pip install gradle-bodyguard

Using

The most basic usage takes only a path to the target Gradle project you want to examine:

→ gradle-bodyguard -p <path-to-gradle-project>

You should see results in your terminal screen 🔥

You also can have a json version of the security report. This file is only generated when the tool find potential vulnerabilities :

→ gradle-bodyguard -p <path-to-gradle-project> -d <path-to-folder>

The gradle-bodyguard-report.json file will be stored at folder

If you realise that some CVEs actually don't impact your project at all, you can just ignore them and exclude such CVEs from the results

→ gradle-bodyguard -p <path-to-gradle-project> -i <CVE-ID>,<CVE-ID>,<CVE-ID>

See usage for a full list of options

→ gradle-bodyguard --help

Using as a Github Action

Coming soon 🔥

Limitations

As mentioned previously, gradle-bodyguard is backed by the amazing OSS Index, offered by Sonatype. If you were not aware of this product until now, you should have a look.

One limitation that gradle-bodyguard has is the following : this tool does not require your OSS Index API TOKEN for authenticated REST API calls; bodyguard avoids that by batching the dependencies computed in the Gradle project and querying 125 Maven coordinates per HTTP request - since this option is available at all.

This should work fine for most of small/medium projects out there(up to 500 dependencies including the transitive ones), and therefore the usage of the tool is a bit simpler as well.

If your project consumes way more dependencies than aforementioned and you started to see 429s in logs when using gradle-bodyguard, fill an issue with a feature request, I'll be happy to implement that.

Credits

I'd like to thank in special :

• Python Poetry because it allowed a newcomer in the Python ecosystem to build and ship his first package on Pypi with an amazing developer experience
• Sonatype for providing OSSIndex (and its companion REST API) for free to the open-source community

Author

Coded by Ubiratan Soares (follow me on Twitter)

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2020 Dotanuki Labs

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