Security Scorecards: OSS Security Scorecards
Security Scorecards
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.
Checks
The following checks are all run against the target project:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Security-MD | Does the project contain a security policy? |
| Contributors | Does the project have contributors from at least two different organizations? |
| Frozen-Deps | Does the project declare and freeze dependencies? |
| Signed-Releases | Does the project cryptographically sign releases? |
| Signed-Tags | Does the project cryptographically sign release tags? |
| CI-Tests | Does the project run tests in CI, e.g. GitHub Actions, Prow? |
| Code-Review | Does the project require code review before the code is merged? |
| CII-Best-Practices | Does the project have a CII Best Practices Badge? |
| Pull-Requests | Does the project use Pull Requests for all code changes? |
| Fuzzing | Does the project use OSS-Fuzz? |
| SAST | Does the project use static code analysis tools, e.g. CodeQL, SonarCloud? |
| Active | Did the project get any commits and releases in last 90 days? |
To see detailed information on how each check works, see the check-specific documentation page.
If you’d like to add a check, make sure it is something that meets the following criteria:
- automate-able
- objective
- actionable
and then create a new GitHub Issue.
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.
Many of the checks are based on heuristics, contributions are welcome to improve the detection!
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.
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.
Requirements
- 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 to 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.
Install & Use
Copyright 2020 Security Scorecard Authors
