The CVE Binary Tool is a free, open source tool to help you find known vulnerabilities in software, using data from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) list of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs).
The tool has two main modes of operation:
- A binary scanner which helps you determine which packages may have been included as part of a piece of software. There are around 100 checkers which focus on common, vulnerable open source components such as openssl, libpng, libxml2 and expat.
- Tools for scanning known component lists in various formats, including .csv, several linux distribution package lists, language specific package scanners and several Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) formats.
It is intended to be used as part of your continuous integration system to enable regular vulnerability scanning and give you early warning of known issues in your supply chain.
For more details, see our documentation or this quickstart guide
- CVE Binary Tool quick start / README
CVE Binary Tool can be installed using pip:
pip install cve-bin-toolYou can also do pip install --user -e . to install a local copy which is useful if you're trying the latest code from
the cve-bin-tool github or doing development. The Contributor Documentation covers how to set up for local development in more detail.
Specifying the --offline option when running a scan ensures that cve-bin-tool doesn't attempt to download the latest database files or to check for a newer version of the tool.
To run the binary scanner on a directory or file:
cve-bin-tool <directory/file>Note that this option will also use any language specific checkers to find known vulnerabilities in components.
To scan a comma-delimited (CSV) or JSON file which lists dependencies and versions:
cve-bin-tool --input-file <filename>Note that the --input-file option can also be used to add extra triage data like remarks, comments etc. while scanning a directory so that output will reflect this triage data and you can save time of re-triaging (Usage: cve-bin-tool -i=test.csv /path/to/scan).
To scan a software bill of materials file (SBOM):
cve-bin-tool --sbom <sbom_filetype> --sbom-file <sbom_filename>Valid SBOM types are SPDX, CycloneDX, and SWID.
The CVE Binary Tool provides console-based output by default. If you wish to provide another format, you can specify this and a filename on the command line using --format. The valid formats are CSV, JSON, console, HTML and PDF. The output filename can be specified using the --output-file flag.
Usage:
cve-bin-tool <directory/file to scan>
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-e, --exclude exclude path while scanning
-V, --version show program's version number and exit
--disable-version-check
skips checking for a new version
--offline operate in offline mode
CVE Data Download:
-n {json,api}, --nvd {json,api}
choose method for getting CVE lists from NVD
-u {now,daily,never,latest}, --update {now,daily,never,latest}
update schedule for NVD database (default: daily)
--nvd-api-key NVD_API_KEY
specify NVD API key (used to improve NVD rate limit)
Input:
directory directory to scan
-i INPUT_FILE, --input-file INPUT_FILE
provide input filename
-C CONFIG, --config CONFIG
provide config file
-L PACKAGE_LIST, --package-list PACKAGE_LIST
provide package list
--sbom {spdx,cyclonedx,swid}
specify type of software bill of materials (sbom)
(default: spdx)
--sbom-file SBOM_FILE
provide sbom filename
Output:
-q, --quiet suppress output
-l {debug,info,warning,error,critical}, --log {debug,info,warning,error,critical}
log level (default: info)
-o OUTPUT_FILE, --output-file OUTPUT_FILE
provide output filename (default: output to stdout)
--html-theme HTML_THEME
provide custom theme directory for HTML Report
-f {csv,json,console,html,pdf}, --format {csv,json,console,html,pdf}
update output format (default: console)
-c CVSS, --cvss CVSS minimum CVSS score (as integer in range 0 to 10) to
report (default: 0)
-S {low,medium,high,critical}, --severity {low,medium,high,critical}
minimum CVE severity to report (default: low)
--report Produces a report even if there are no CVE for the
respective output format
--affected-versions Lists versions of product affected by a given CVE (to facilitate upgrades)
-b [<distro_name>-<distro_version_name>], --backport-fix [<distro_name>-<distro_version_name>]
Lists backported fixes if available from Linux distribution
Merge Report:
-a INTERMEDIATE_PATH, --append INTERMEDIATE_PATH
provide path for saving intermediate report
-t TAG, --tag TAG provide a tag to differentiate between multiple intermediate reports
-m INTERMEDIATE_REPORTS, --merge INTERMEDIATE_REPORTS
comma separated intermediate reports path for merging
-F TAGS, --filter TAGS
comma separated tags to filter out intermediate reports
Checkers:
-s SKIPS, --skips SKIPS
comma-separated list of checkers to disable
-r RUNS, --runs RUNS comma-separated list of checkers to enable
Deprecated:
-x, --extract autoextract compressed files
CVE Binary Tool autoextracts all compressed files by default now
For further information about all of these options, please see the CVE Binary Tool user manual.
Note: For backward compatibility, we still support
csv2cvecommand for producing CVEs from csv but we recommend using the--input-filecommand going forwards.
-L or --package-list option runs a CVE scan on installed packages listed in a package list. It takes a python package list (requirements.txt) or a package list of packages of systems that has dpkg, pacman or rpm package manager as an input for the scan. This option is much faster and detects more CVEs than the default method of scanning binaries.
You can get a package list of all installed packages in
- a system using dpkg package manager by running
dpkg-query -W -f '${binary:Package}\n' > pkg-list - a system using pacman package manager by running
pacman -Qqe > pkg-list - a system using rpm package manager by running
rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}\n' > pkg-list
in the terminal and provide it as an input by running cve-bin-tool -L pkg-list for a full package scan.
You can use --config option to provide configuration file for the tool. You can still override options specified in config file with command line arguments. See our sample config files in the
test/config
If you want to integrate cve-bin-tool as a part of your github action pipeline. You can checkout our example github action.
The following checkers are available for finding components in binary files:
| Available checkers | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| accountsservice | avahi | bash | bind | binutils | bolt | bubblewrap |
| busybox | bzip2 | cronie | cryptsetup | cups | curl | dbus |
| dnsmasq | dovecot | dpkg | enscript | expat | ffmpeg | freeradius |
| ftp | gcc | gimp | glibc | gnomeshell | gnupg | gnutls |
| gpgme | gstreamer | gupnp | haproxy | hdf5 | hostapd | hunspell |
| icecast | icu | irssi | kbd | kerberos | kexectools | libarchive |
| libbpg | libdb | libebml | libgcrypt | libical | libjpeg_turbo | liblas |
| libnss | librsvg | libseccomp | libsndfile | libsolv | libsoup | libsrtp |
| libssh2 | libtiff | libvirt | libvncserver | libxslt | lighttpd | logrotate |
| lua | mariadb | mdadm | memcached | mtr | mysql | nano |
| ncurses | nessus | netpbm | nginx | node | ntp | open_vm_tools |
| openafs | openjpeg | openldap | openssh | openssl | openswan | openvpn |
| p7zip | pcsc_lite | pigz | png | polarssl_fedora | poppler | postgresql |
| pspp | python | qt | radare2 | rsyslog | samba | sane_backends |
| sqlite | strongswan | subversion | sudo | syslogng | systemd | tcpdump |
| trousers | varnish | webkitgtk | wireshark | wpa_supplicant | xerces | xml2 |
| zlib | zsh |
All the checkers can be found in the checkers directory, as can the instructions on how to add a new checker. Support for new checkers can be requested via GitHub issues.
A number of checkers are available for finding vulnerable components in specific language packages.
The scanner examines the pom.xml file within a Java package archive to identify Java components. The package names and versions within the archive are used to search the database for vulnerabilities.
JAR, WAR and EAR archives are supported.
The scanner examines the package-lock.json file within a javascript application
to identify components. The package names and versions are used to search the database for vulnerabilities.
The scanner examines the PKG-INFO and METADATA files for an installed Python package to extract the component name and version which
are used to search the database for vulnerabilities.
The tool supports the scanning of the contents of any Wheel package files (indicated with a file extension of .whl) and egg package files (indicated with a file extension of .egg).
The --package-list option can be used with a Python dependencies file requirements.txt to find the vulnerabilities in the list of components.
This scanner does not attempt to exploit issues or examine the code in greater detail; it only looks for library signatures and version numbers. As such, it cannot tell if someone has backported fixes to a vulnerable version, and it will not work if library or version information was intentionally obfuscated.
This tool is meant to be used as a quick-to-run, easily-automatable check in a non-malicious environment so that developers can be made aware of old libraries with security issues that have been compiled into their binaries.
If you are using the binary scanner capabilities, be aware that we only have a limited number of binary checkers (see table above) so we can only detect those libraries. Contributions of new checkers are always welcome! You can also use an alternate way to detect components (for example, a bill of materials tool such as tern) and then use the resulting list as input to cve-bin-tool to get a more comprehensive vulnerability list.
To use the auto-extractor, you may need the following utilities depending on the type of file you need to extract. The utilities below are required to run the full test suite on Linux:
filestringstarunziprpm2cpiocpioarcabextract
Most of these are installed by default on many Linux systems, but cabextract and
rpm2cpio in particular might need to be installed.
On windows systems, you may need:
ar7zExpandpdftotext
Windows has ar and Expand installed by default, but 7z in particular might need to be installed.
If you want to run our test-suite or scan a zstd compressed file, We recommend installing this 7-zip-zstd
fork of 7zip. We are currently using 7z for extracting jar, apk, msi, exe and rpm files.
If you get an error about building libraries when you try to install from pip, you may need to install the Windows build tools. The Windows build tools are available for free from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/
If you get an error while installing brotlipy on Windows, installing the compiler above should fix it.
pdftotext is required for running tests. (users of cve-bin-tool may not need it, developers likely will.) The best approach to install it on Windows involves using conda (click here for further instructions).
You can check our CI configuration to see what versions of python we're explicitly testing.
Bugs and feature requests can be made via GitHub issues. Be aware that these issues are not private, so take care when providing output to make sure you are not disclosing security issues in other products.
Pull requests are also welcome via git.
- New contributors should read the contributor guide to get started.
- Folk who already have experience contributing to open source projects may not need the full guide but should still use the pull request checklist to make things easy for everyone.
Security issues with the tool itself can be reported to Intel's security incident response team via https://intel.com/security.
If in the course of using this tool you discover a security issue with someone else's code, please disclose responsibly to the appropriate party.