Announcing a unified vulnerability schema for open source

This article has been indexed from Google Online Security Blog

Posted by Oliver Chang, Google Open Source Security team and Russ Cox, Go team 

In recent months, Google has launched several efforts to strengthen open-source security on multiple fronts. One important focus is improving how we identify and respond to known security vulnerabilities without doing extensive manual work. It is essential to have a precise common data format to triage and remediate security vulnerabilities, particularly when communicating about risks to affected dependencies—it enables easier automation and empowers consumers of open-source software to know when they are impacted and make security fixes as soon as possible.

We released the Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) database in February with the goal of automating and improving vulnerability triage for developers and users of open source software. This initial effort was bootstrapped with a dataset of a few thousand vulnerabilities from the OSS-Fuzz project. Implementing OSV to communicate precise vulnerability data for hundreds of critical open-source projects proved the success and utility of the format, and garnered feedback to help us improve the project; for example, we dropped the Cloud API key requirement, making the database even easier to access by more users. The community response also showed that there was broad interest in extending the effort further.

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