Security Scorecards - Security Health Metrics For Open Source

Security Health Metrics For Open Source

Motivation

A short motivational video clip to inspire us: https://youtu.be/rDMMYT3vkTk "You passed! All D's ... and an A!"

Goals

Automate analysis and trust decisions on the security posture of open source projects.

Use this data to proactively improve the security posture of the critical projects the world depends on.

Scorecard Checks

The following checks are all run against the target project by default:

Name Description

Active	Did the project get any commits in the last 90 days?
Automatic-Dependency-Update	Does the project use tools to automatically update its dependencies?
Binary-Artifacts	Is the project free of checked-in binaries?
Branch-Protection	Does the project use Branch Protection ?
CI-Tests	Does the project run tests in CI, e.g. GitHub Actions, Prow?
CII-Best-Practices	Does the project have a CII Best Practices Badge?
Code-Review	Does the project require code review before code is merged?
Contributors	Does the project have contributors from at least two different organizations?
Fuzzing	Does the project use fuzzing tools, e.g. OSS-Fuzz?
Frozen-Deps	Does the project declare and freeze dependencies?
Packaging	Does the project build and publish official packages from CI/CD, e.g. GitHub Publishing ?
Pull-Requests	Does the project use Pull Requests for all code changes?
SAST	Does the project use static code analysis tools, e.g. CodeQL, SonarCloud?
Security-Policy	Does the project contain a security policy?
Signed-Releases	Does the project cryptographically sign releases?
Signed-Tags	Does the project cryptographically sign release tags?
Token-Permissions	Does the project declare GitHub workflow tokens as read only?
Vulnerabilities	Does the project have unfixed vulnerabilities? Uses the OSV service.

To see detailed information about each check and remediation steps, check out the checks documentation page.

Usage

Using repository URL

The program can run using just one argument, the URL of the repo:

For more details why a check fails, use the --show-details option:

Using a Package manager

scorecard has an option to provide either --npm / --pypi / --rubygems package name and it would run the checks on the corresponding GitHub source code.

For example:

Running specific checks

To use a particular check(s), add the --checks argument with a list of check names.

For example, --checks=CI-Tests,Code-Review.

Authentication

Before running Scorecard, you need to, either:

create a GitHub access token and set it in environment variable GITHUB_AUTH_TOKEN. This helps to avoid the GitHub's api rate limits with unauthenticated requests.

Multiple GITHUB_AUTH_TOKEN can be provided separated by comma to be utilized in a round robin fashion.

create a GitHub App Installations for higher rate-limit quotas. If you have an installed GitHub App and key file, you can use these three environment variables, following the commands shown above for your platform.

These can be obtained from the GitHub developer settings page.

Understanding Scorecard results

Each check returns a Pass / Fail decision, as well as a confidence score between 0 and 10. A confidence of 0 should indicate the check was unable to achieve any real signal, and the result should be ignored. A confidence of 10 indicates the check is completely sure of the result.

Formatting Results

There are three formats currently: default, json, and csv. Others may be added in the future.

These may be specified with the --format flag.

Public Data

If you're only interested in seeing a list of projects with their Scorecard check results, we publish these results in a BigQuery public dataset.

This data is available in the public BigQuery dataset openssf:scorecardcron.scorecard. The latest results are available in the BigQuery view openssf:scorecardcron.scorecard_latest.

You can extract the latest results to Google Cloud storage in JSON format using the bq tool:

The list of projects that are checked is available in the cron/data/projects.csv file in this repository. If you would like us to track more, please feel free to send a Pull Request with others.

NOTE: Currently, these lists are derived from projects hosted on GitHub ONLY. We do plan to expand them in near future to account for projects hosted on other source control systems.

Adding a Scorecard Check

If you'd like to add a check, make sure it is something that meets the following criteria and then create a new GitHub Issue:

The scorecard must only be composed of automate-able, objective data. For example, a project having 10 contributors doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more secure than a project with say 50 contributors. But, having two maintainers might be preferable to only having one - the larger bus factor and ability to provide code reviews is objectively better. The scorecard criteria can be as specific as possible and not limited general recommendations. For example, for Go, we can recommend/require specific linters and analyzers to be run on the codebase. The scorecard can be populated for any open source project without any work or interaction from maintainers. Maintainers must be provided with a mechanism to correct any automated scorecard findings they feel were made in error, provide "hints" for anything we can't detect automatically, and even dispute the applicability of a given scorecard finding for that repository. Any criteria in the scorecard must be actionable. It should be possible, with help, for any project to "check all the boxes". Any solution to compile a scorecard should be usable by the greater open source community to monitor upstream security.

Troubleshooting

Bugs and Feature Requests:

If you have what looks like a bug, or you would like to make a feature request, please use the Github issue tracking system. Before you file an issue, please search existing issues to see if your issue is already covered.

Slack

For realtime discussion, you can join the #security_scorecards slack channel. Slack requires registration, but the openssf team is open invitation to anyone to register here. Feel free to come and ask any questions.

Supportability

Currently, scorecard officially supports OSX and Linux platforms. So, if you are using a Windows OS you may find issues. Contributions towards supporting Windows are welcome.

Contributing

If you want to get involved or have ideas you'd like to chat about, we discuss this project in the OSSF Best Practices Working Group meetings.

See the Community Calendar for the schedule and meeting invitations. The meetings happen biweekly https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=s63voefhp5i9pfltb5q67ngpes%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America%2FLos_Angeles

See the Contributing documentation for guidance on how to contribute.