How to report

When an advisory is published for a dependency, more often than not, the project does not use the dependency in a way that is affected by the problem described in the advisory. For this reason we don't accept the simple fact that an advisory exists for a dependency as a security issue in itself.

If you have done any analysis to confirm the issue described in the advisory does impact this project, please share that information with us though the private channels described at https://wwwIf you are using Apache software and would like to report the fact that there are advisories for dependencies, please see https://security.apache.org/security/.

If you have verified the issue does not impact the project, it would be appreciated to share this analysis through the project's public channels.

If you have not done any analysis on whether the advisory for the dependency impacts the project, you can consult the projects' public channels to find out if anyone else has done any research into this advisory. Some projects (such as Solr) have a dedicated page for such information, otherwise you could look at their issue tracker or public mailinglists. If no existing analysis on the issue can be found, you may open a public issue or discussion on the mailinglist. Contributions upgrading the dependency to a version that is not affected by the problem are also generally welcomedreport-dependency/.

Detecting advisories for dependencies

For Java (Maven/Gradle) projects, the OWASP DependencyCheck plugin can be a useful tool to discover advisories in dependencies.

If you publish a Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM) for your artifacts, there are various tools that can detect advisories in dependencies based on that. For more information about SBOMs see SBOM Software Bill of Materials

If you're using GitHub, and it is well-supported for your ecosystem, the Dependency Submission and Dependabot security updates features may work as well.

Publishing machine-readable analysis results

Various scanning tools exist to flag advisories in dependencies, which can be run by us, but also by users of our software. To improve the accuracy of such tools, it would be great if we could share the analysis of whether an advisory in a dependency affects our project in a machine-readable way. VEX (and to some extent VDR) file formats are meant for this. The ecosystem around these tools is still very much in development, if you want to experiment with these feel free to email security@apache.org. For example, the Solr project publishes their analysis results as VEX.

Consuming VEX

VEX documents can be consumed by our DependencyTrack instance. You can read more about this on the page about SBOM Software Bill of Materials.

Some security scanners, such as https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/ and https://github.com/intel/cve-bin-tool, are starting to support VEX as well.