Kubescape: The 1st Open Source project to support VEX Generation
Introduction
Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) is a vulnerability document designed to complement a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). It informs users of a software product about the applicability of one or more vulnerability findings.
Security scanners will detect and flag components in software that have been identified as being vulnerable. Often, software is not necessarily affected as signaled by security scanners for many reasons.
For example:
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The vulnerable component may have been already patched,
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The vulnerable component may not be present
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The vulnerable code is not actually executed.
The extreme transparency brought by SBOMs into how software is composed will most likely increase the number of these kinds of false positives, requiring an automated solution to avoid an explosion in the false positive rate of security scans. Hence VEX.
Using VEX is a way to turn down the noise, and give security practitioners a good strong signal, a scanner may consume VEX data from the software supplier. However, it is time consuming to write a VEX document and since it is imperative these documents stay current, it is a never ending task. The solution to this must come via automation.