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SCA agent-based scan quickstart

This quickstart steps you through a Veracode SCA agent-based scan of a demo application from a command prompt. It also steps you through reviewing the results in the Veracode Platform.

You use Software Composition Analysis (SCA) to:

  • Identify vulnerabilities in open-source libraries and their dependencies.
  • Detect the risk level of open-source licenses.
  • Fix vulnerabilities quickly.
  • Help your organization decide which licenses to change to a safe version.

To run your first SCA scan, complete the following tasks:

  • Obtain a Veracode account with the required permissions.
  • Confirm you can access the demo application for your first SCA scan.
  • Sign in to the Veracode Platform.
  • Use the Veracode Platform to create a workspace SCA agent.
  • Run your first SCA scan at a command prompt and review the results.
  • Use the Veracode Platform to review the results.

Obtain a Veracode account​

  • To access the Veracode Platform, you must have a Veracode human user account.
  • To run an SCA agent-based scan, your account must have an SCA subscription.
  • To configure scans, submit scans, and review scan results, your account must have the Workspace Administrator or Workspace Editor, Security Lead, and Submitter roles.

Check with the Veracode Administrator for your organization to confirm that you have an account with the required roles. If you are a Veracode Administrator, your account likely has the required roles. If it does not, you can add roles to your account in the Veracode Platform.

Access the repo for the demo application​

To complete this quickstart, ensure you can access the demo application in the repo veracode/example-ruby. You do not need to clone, download, or compile this demo application.

In this demo application, several libraries have vulnerabilities and several licenses are at unsafe versions. You will see these vulnerabilities and at-risk licenses in the scan results.

Sign in to the Veracode Platform​

Sign in to the Veracode Platform domain for your region using one of the following methods. Each region has a unique URL. This quickstart uses the Commercial Region domain: https://analysiscenter.veracode.com/. Your account might be in a different domain, such as the European Region: https://analysiscenter.veracode.eu/

  • If you have a new Veracode account, you received a welcome email that provides a link for activating your account in the Veracode Platform. If you did not receive the welcome email, contact your Veracode Administrator.
  • If you have an active Veracode account, you can sign in to the Veracode Platform using the domain for your region. If your organization uses a Single Sign-On (SSO) portal such as Okta, you can also access the Veracode Platform with SSO.

Create a workspace SCA agent​

An SCA workspace contains one or more projects. A project is a local or remote Git repo that contains your application source code. For this quickstart, the project is the demo application and the workspace is the default called My Workspace, which is included with your SCA subscription.

You install and activate an SCA agent on your local system using My Workspace. The SCA agent is a small script you run from a command prompt.

note

Ensure your organization has given you permission to install software on your local system.

The SCA agent will:

  • Build the application.
  • Create a dependency graph of all libraries and their dependencies.
  • Scan your application and communicate with Veracode SCA to detect vulnerabilities and at-risk licenses.
  • Display the results in your command console and upload the results to My Workspace in the Veracode Platform.

To complete this task:

  1. On the Platform Home page, select Scans & Analysis > Software Composition Analysis.

  2. On the Software Composition Analysis page, select the Agent-Based Scan tab.

  3. In the WORKSPACE LIST table, select My Workspace.

  4. From the left pane, under Manage Workspace, select Agents.

  5. Under Set Up Scanner, select the blue box for your operating system: OS X, LINUX, or WINDOWS.

    If this is not your first time creating an agent, you see the Agents table, rather than the Set Up Scanner page. Above the Agents table, select Actions > Create.

    The page changes to a list of commands for setting up the SCA agent. To install the agent with a specific tool installed on your system, select the subtab for that tool. For example, if you select WINDOWS, you see subtabs for chocolatey and PowerShell.

  6. At the command prompt, run the commands that you see in the Veracode Platform to install and activate the SCA agent for your operating system.

    note

    For this quickstart, do not run the command that starts the scan.

  7. To ensure you installed the SCA agent successfully, run the following command:

    srcclr test

    The command output shows the agent version and details about your operating system, including the installed package managers. If you see an error, try re-installing the agent or generate a new activation token for your agent in the Veracode Platform.

Run your first SCA scan and review the results​

Run an SCA agent-based scan and view the results in your command console.

To complete this task:

  1. At the command prompt, run the following command to scan the demo application with the --update-advisor option.

    srcclr scan --update-advisor --url https://github.com/veracode/example-ruby

    The Update Advisor lists the safe versions of libraries that Veracode recommends for your project. The --url option specifies the URL for a remote Git repo. To scan a local repo, replace --url with the path to your project, such as /my/project. Refer to the complete list of command options.

    The results appear in your command console. If you see a warning that the agent is unable to clean up the scan directory, you can delete the scan directory and retry your command.

  2. Review the following information in the results.

    Results Summary

    The top sections of the results show a general summary of the scan. Because the demo application is Ruby, the scan used the Gem package manager. You can quickly see the number of libraries you scanned, including direct and transitive, and the number of libraries with vulnerabilities. Under the Vulnerable Methods section, the scan detected a library with a vulnerable method, which is a high-risk vulnerability. When prioritizing which vulnerabilities to fix, Veracode strongly recommends that you fix vulnerable methods first.

    Summary Report
    Scan ID                                        8f106664-3e2f-499a-bbf5-40939d55cf0a
    Scan Date & Time                               Jan 04 2023 04:41PM EST
    Account type                                   ENTERPRISE
    Scan engine                                    3.8.17 (latest 3.8.17)
    Analysis time                                  3 seconds
    User                                           verauser
    Project                                        https://github.com/veracode/example-ruby
    Package Manager(s)                             Gem

    Open-Source Libraries
    Total Libraries                                127
    Direct Libraries                               18
    Transitive Libraries                           111
    Vulnerable Libraries                           34
    Third Party Code                               99.9%

    Vulnerable Methods
    1 vulnerable method can be reached via the code's call graph

    Call Source                                    Method Name               Library
    ApplicationHelper [line 2]                     SSL.redirect_to_https     rack-ssl : 1.0.0

    Security
    With Vulnerable Methods                        1
    High Risk Vulnerabilities                      15
    Medium Risk Vulnerabilities                    85
    Low Risk Vulnerabilities                       4

    Vulnerabilities

    The Vulnerabilities sections list all vulnerabilities, sorted by risk level, that the scan found for the open-source libraries in your project. Public Data refers to vulnerabilities with a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Premium Data refers to vulnerabilities that do not yet have a CVE ID from the NVD, but Veracode research has determined that they are potential risks, added them to the Veracode Vulnerability Database, and assigned each one a Veracode ID.

    Vulnerabilities - Public Data
    CVE-2019-5421                                  High Risk       Time-of-check To Time-of-Use (TOCTOU)                                                devise 4.1.1
    CVE-2016-2098                                  High Risk       Remote Code Execution (RCE) Through Render Method                                    actionview 4.2.5
    CVE-2022-45442                                 High Risk       Reflected File Download                                                              sinatra 1.1.4
    CVE-2017-0889                                  High Risk       Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)                                                   paperclip 4.2.4
    CVE-2022-30123                                 High Risk       OS Command Injection                                                                 rack 1.6.4
    ...

    Vulnerabilities - Premium Data
    NO-CVE                                         High Risk       Arbitrary Command Execution When Handling Metacharacters                             lingq 0.3.1
    NO-CVE                                         High Risk       Copy-Paste Vulnerability (CPV) Through Libxml2                                       nokogiri 1.6.7.2
    NO-CVE                                         High Risk       Heap-Based Buffer Overflow In Libxml2                                                nokogiri 1.6.7.2
    NO-CVE                                         High Risk       Copy-Paste Vulnerability (CPV) Through Libxml2                                       nokogiri 1.6.7.2
    NO-CVE                                         High Risk       Remote Code Execution (RCE)                                                          nokogiri 1.6.7.2
    ...

    Licenses

    The Licenses section shows the number of licenses, by category, that you scanned. In particular, your organization can use the license risk categories to prioritize which licenses they might need to change to a safe version.

    Licenses
    Unique Library Licenses                        13
    Libraries Using GPL                            3
    Libraries With High Risk License               3
    Libraries With Medium Risk License             3
    Libraries With Low Risk License                111
    Libraries With Multiple Licenses               3
    Libraries With Unassessable License            1
    Libraries With Unrecognizable License          19

    Issues

    The Issues section lists all issues that Veracode created during the scan. Issues help you manage all security risks for a particular project.

    Issues
    Issue ID     Issue Type          Severity    Description                                                  Library Name & Version In Use
    153301596    Vulnerability       7.8         CVE-2019-5419: Denial Of Service (DoS)                       actionpack 4.2.5
    153301597    Vulnerability       5.0         CVE-2015-7581: Objects Leaked Globally                       actionpack 4.2.5
    153301598    Vulnerability       5.0         CVE-2021-22904: Denial Of Service (DoS)                      actionpack 4.2.5
    153301599    Vulnerability       5.0         CVE-2016-0751: Denial Of Service (DoS) Memory Consumption    actionpack 4.2.5
    ...

    Update Advisor

    The Update Advisor section provides you with a quick lookup for the safe version of a vulnerable library. The Breaking Update column indicates whether updating a library to that safe version might break your application builds.

    Update Advisor
    Library Name & Version         Safe Version     Breaking Update
    administrate 0.1.4             0.13.0           No
    turbolinks 2.5.3               2.5.4            No
    devise_invitable 1.3.4         1.3.5            No
    rack-ssl 1.0.0                 1.3.4            Yes
    authlogic 1.4.3                3.4.5            Yes

Review example SCA scan results in the Veracode Platform​

After you run an SCA agent-based scan at the command prompt, the results are also available in the Veracode Platform. The Veracode Platform provides graphical representations of the results, which you can compare to the results in your command console.

This procedure uses the default workspace My Workspace and assumes your My Workspace only contains the demo application srcclr/example-ruby. In the Veracode Platform, the pages show the results for all projects in the selected workspace. If your My Workspace contains multiple projects, your results will not match the results in this quickstart.

If you included the --no-upload option in your scan command, the results are not available in the Veracode Platform.

To complete this task:

  1. On the Platform Home page, go to Scans & Analysis and select Software Composition Analysis.

  2. On the Software Composition Analysis page, select the Agent-Based Scan tab.

  3. In the WORKSPACE LIST table, select My Workspace.

  4. Select Issues to see a list of all issues in My Workspace.

    By default, the page shows the vulnerability issues that are active (not ignored), of all severities, and open (not resolved). To view the other issue types, next to ISSUES LIST, select License Issues or Library Issues.

    sca_agent_quickstart_issues_page.png

  5. Select an issue for detailed information about the related project and the at-risk component.

    In the following example, because you selected a vulnerability issue, the component is a library. The The Fix tab provides instructions for fixing the vulnerability. To see if there are vulnerable methods, select the Vulnerable Methods tab.

    sca_agent_quickstart_issue_details_page.png

  6. Select the Dependency Graph tab. This interactive, color-coded graph shows the relationship between the vulnerable library for the selected issue and its dependencies.

    sca_agent_quickstart_dep_graph.png

  7. Select Projects to view all projects in My Workspace. Then, select srcclr/example-ruby.

    sca_agent_quickstart_projects_page.png

  8. Select the tabs to view the results for the selected project.

    The Project page provides you with a consolidated view of all results for the selected project.

    sca_agent_quickstart_project_details_page.png

  9. Select Vulnerabilities to view a list of all vulnerabilities in My Workspace.

    To view detailed information about a vulnerability in the Veracode Vulnerability Database, select its name. To view which projects have a vulnerability, expand the project number in the Projects column.

    sca_agent_quickstart_vulns_page.png

  10. Select Libraries to view a list of libraries from all projects in My Workspace.

By default, the page shows the matched libraries that are available in the Veracode Vulnerability Database. To view the unmatched libraries, which are not in the database, select Unmatched Libraries. To view detailed information about a library in the database, select its name. In the Vulnerabilities, Dependency Graph, and Licenses columns, you can expand a cell to view the values for that library.

sca_agent_quickstart_libraries_page.png

  1. Select Licenses to view a list of all open-source licenses in My Workspace.

To view the libraries that use that license and the projects that contain it, expand the cell in the last column. Click the library name to view details about it in the vulnerability database or select the project name to go to that project.

sca_agent_quickstart_licenses_page.png

Next steps​