Introduction to rosv • rosv

Package purpose

The {rosv} package provides two core purposes:

Access information from the Open Source Vulnerability (OSV) database.
Operate on vulnerability information and create formatted lists for package administration.

Consequently, the functions in {rosv} relate to querying or downloading content from OSV, parsing JSON content, and generating tables and lists regarding key information on package vulnerabilities. The OSV database is not specific to R related repositories such as CRAN; users can access information on any ecosystem available in OSV. For R users who also dabble in Python, they can search for package vulnerabilities within the PyPI repository while remaining in an R interface.

Basic Examples

The following examples will outline an assortment of package functionality but first we must load the package!

library(rosv)

Detect vulnerable packages

One of the simplest queries is to provide a package and ecosystem and return a TRUE/FALSE response informing you if that package has ever been listed with a vulnerability.

is_pkg_vulnerable(c('dask', 'dash'), ecosystem = c('PyPI', 'PyPI'))

#>  dask  dash 
#>  TRUE FALSE

The number of vulnerabilities detected for each package can also be queried.

osv_count_vulns(c('dask', 'readxl', 'dplyr'), c('PyPI', 'CRAN', 'CRAN'))

#>   dask readxl  dplyr 
#>      1      3      0

List package vulnerabilities

The most basic usage of {rosv} is to pull all versions of an ecosystem’s packages (e.g. PyPI or CRAN) listed in the OSV database. This can be achieved using high-level functions such as osv_query() and create_osv_list().

To start we can query one package in PyPI for vulnerabilities.

pkg_vul <- osv_query('dask', ecosystem = 'PyPI', all_affected = FALSE)

Use the OSV query to generate a sorted and de-duplicated list of just package name and version.

pkg_tbl <- create_osv_list(pkg_vul, as.data.frame = TRUE)
head(pkg_tbl, 3)

#>   name versions
#> 1 dask   0.10.0
#> 2 dask   0.10.1
#> 3 dask   0.10.2

Pull the entire set of PyPI vulnerability data and de-duplicate

pkg_vul <- osv_query(ecosystem = 'PyPI', all_affected = FALSE)
pypi_vul <- create_osv_list(pkg_vul, as.data.frame = FALSE, NA_value = ' ')
head(pypi_vul, 3)

#> [1] "aaiohttp\t "           "accesscontrol\t2.13.0" "accesscontrol\t2.13.1"

Scan an R project

Packages discovered within an R project (such as {renv} LOCK files and installed packages at .libPaths()) can be parsed and scanned directly using osv_scan(). A data.frame is returned with the package name and a logical value specifying if a vulnerability was discovered in the OSV database. If a particular scanning mode does not exist, similar functionality can be created if a package list and associated version information is passed to is_pkg_vulnerable().

osv_scan('r_project')

#>         name version ecosystem is_vul
#> 1 commonmark   1.9.0      CRAN   TRUE
#> 2   jsonlite   1.8.7      CRAN   TRUE
#> 3    askpass   1.2.0      CRAN  FALSE
#> 4       base   4.3.1      CRAN  FALSE

Use API helpers directly

Lower-level functions return more detail about the API request and response contained within the R6 object. These are more flexible than their higher-level alternatives. By default, the results of these functions will be cached. This can be overriden by specifying cache = FALSE.

The higher-level API query function osv_query() builds upon these helpers to align the format of returned content, making it the preferred choice for typical use-cases.

# Returns entire response object to parse as you please.
osv_query_1('dask', ecosystem = 'PyPI')

# Returns the vulnerability IDs for packages in list
osv_querybatch('dask', ecosystem = 'PyPI')

# Return vulnerabilities from different ecosystems as vectors
osv_querybatch(c('dask', 'readxl'), ecosystem = c('PyPI', 'CRAN'))

# Grab details by vulns ID
osv_vulns('PYSEC-2021-387')

# Download vulns for an ecosystem
osv_download('PYSEC-2021-387', 'PyPI')
osv_download(ecosystem = 'PyPI', download_only = TRUE)

Result caching

By default, results from queries using API helpers (e.g. osv_query() or osv_querybatch()) will cache results using memoise::memoise(). The caching can be turned off directly using function parameters or globally reset using clear_osv_cache(). Caching is the default behavior to help enforce polite access of the OSV API. When clearing the cache, all vulnerability files saved to disk at the temporary R session location will also be removed (refer to the environment variable ROSV_CACHE_GLOBAL).

# Query without caching
osv_query('dask', ecosystem = 'PyPI', cache = FALSE)

# File will be saved to disk
osv_download('PYSEC-2021-387', 'PyPI')

# Clear cache, as needed
clear_osv_cache()

Creating a cross-referenced whitelist

When using a product such as {miniCRAN} or Posit Package Manager there may be corporate requirements to limit what packages users can install. Although having a whitelist is often recommended, it should either specify the exact versions that are approved or exclude packages with known vulnerabilities. Given the sheer amount of packages and their versions, this is often difficult. The following method will take a vector of packages (from PyPI) and cross-reference against the OSV database. If packages are identified they are either entirely dropped, or the specific versions with flagged vulnerabilities are excluded.

# List of packages of interest
python_pkg <- c('dask', 'dash', 'keras')

# Create the xref whitelist
xref_pkg_list <- create_xref_whitelist(python_pkg,
                                       ecosystem = 'PyPI',
                                       output_format = 'requirements.txt')

# Output requirements.txt which can be used with PPM product
writeLines(xref_pkg_list, file.path(tempdir(), 'requirements.txt'))