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Vulnerability Pages (ULTIMATE)

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 13.0.

Each security vulnerability in a project's Vulnerability Report has an individual page which includes:

  • Details of the vulnerability.
  • The status of the vulnerability in the project.
  • Available actions for the vulnerability.
  • Any issues related to the vulnerability.

On the vulnerability's page, you can:

Change vulnerability status

You can change the status of a vulnerability using the Status dropdown to one of the following values:

Status Description
Detected The default state for a newly discovered vulnerability
Confirmed A user has seen this vulnerability and confirmed it to be accurate
Dismissed A user has seen this vulnerability and dismissed it because it is not accurate or otherwise not to be resolved
Resolved The vulnerability has been fixed and is no longer valid

A timeline shows you when the vulnerability status has changed and allows you to comment on a change.

Create an issue for a vulnerability

From a vulnerability's page you can create an issue to track all action taken to resolve or mitigate it.

From a vulnerability you can create either:

Creating a Jira issue requires that Jira integration is enabled on the project. Note that when Jira integration is enabled, the GitLab issue feature is not available.

Create a GitLab issue for a vulnerability

To create a GitLab issue for a vulnerability:

  1. In GitLab, go to the vulnerability's page.
  2. Select Create issue.

An issue is created in the project, pre-populated with information from the vulnerability report. The issue is then opened so you can take further action.

Create a Jira issue for a vulnerability

WARNING: This feature might not be available to you. Check the version history note above for details.

Prerequisites:

  • Enable Jira integration. The Enable Jira issues creation from vulnerabilities option must be selected as part of the configuration.
  • Each user must have a personal Jira user account with permission to create issues in the target project.

To create a Jira issue for a vulnerability:

  1. Go to the vulnerability's page.
  2. Select Create Jira issue.
  3. If you're not already logged in to Jira, log in.

The Jira issue is created and opened in a new browser tab. The Summary and Description fields are pre-populated from the vulnerability's details.

Enable or disable Jira integration for vulnerabilities (ULTIMATE SELF)

The option to create a Jira issue for a vulnerability is under development but ready for production use. It is deployed behind a feature flag that is enabled by default. GitLab administrators with access to the GitLab Rails console can opt to disable it.

To enable it:

Feature.enable(:jira_for_vulnerabilities)

To disable it:

Feature.disable(:jira_for_vulnerabilities)

Link GitLab issues to the vulnerability

NOTE: If Jira issue support is enabled, GitLab issues are disabled so this feature is not available.

You can link one or more existing GitLab issues to the vulnerability. This allows you to indicate that this vulnerability affects multiple issues. It also allows you to indicate that the resolution of one issue would resolve multiple vulnerabilities.

Linked issues are shown in the Vulnerability Report and the vulnerability's page.

Link to an existing issue

If you already have an open issue, you can link to it from the vulnerability.

  • The vulnerability page shows related issues, but the issue page doesn't show the vulnerability it's related to.
  • An issue can only be related to one vulnerability at a time.
  • Issues can be linked across groups and projects.

To link to an existing issue:

  1. Open the vulnerability.
  2. Add a linked issue.

Remediate a vulnerability automatically

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 11.7.

Some vulnerabilities can be fixed by applying the solution that GitLab automatically generates. The following scanners are supported:

Remediate a vulnerability manually

To manually apply the patch that GitLab generated for a vulnerability:

  1. Select the Resolve with merge request dropdown, then select Download patch to resolve:

    Resolve with Merge Request button dropdown

  2. Ensure your local project has the same commit checked out that was used to generate the patch.

  3. Run git apply remediation.patch.

  4. Verify and commit the changes to your branch.

Create a merge request with the suggested patch

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 11.9.

In some cases, you can create a merge request that automatically remediates the vulnerability. Any vulnerability that has a solution can have a merge request created to automatically solve the issue.

If this action is available:

  1. Select the Resolve with merge request dropdown, then select Resolve with merge request.

    Create merge request from vulnerability

A merge request is created. It applies the solution to the source branch.

Vulnerability scanner maintenance

The following vulnerability scanners and their databases are regularly updated:

Secure scanning tool Vulnerabilities database updates
Container Scanning Uses either trivy or clair. For the trivy scanner, a job runs on a daily basis to build a new image with the latest vulnerability database updates from the upstream trivy-db. For the clair scanner, the latest clair-db version is used; clair-db database is updated daily according to the author.
Dependency Scanning Relies on bundler-audit (for Ruby gems), retire.js (for npm packages), and gemnasium (the GitLab tool for all libraries). Both bundler-audit and retire.js fetch their vulnerabilities data from GitHub repositories, so vulnerabilities added to ruby-advisory-db and retire.js are immediately available. The tools themselves are updated once per month if there's a new version. The Gemnasium DB is updated at least once a week. See our current measurement of time from CVE being issued to our product being updated.
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) The scanning engine is updated on a periodic basis. See the version of the underlying tool zaproxy. The scanning rules are downloaded at scan runtime.
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Relies exclusively on the tools GitLab wraps. The underlying analyzers are updated at least once per month if a relevant update is available. The vulnerabilities database is updated by the upstream tools.

You do not have to update GitLab to benefit from the latest vulnerabilities definitions. The security tools are released as Docker images. The vendored job definitions that enable them use major release tags according to semantic versioning. Each new release of the tools overrides these tags. The Docker images are updated to match the previous GitLab releases. Although you automatically get the latest versions of the scanning tools, there are some known issues with this approach.