Continuous Vulnerability Scanning

DETAILS: Tier: Ultimate Offering: GitLab.com, Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated

• Introduced in GitLab 16.4 as an Experiment with multiple feature flags enabled by default.
• Feature flags removed in GitLab 16.10.
• Continuous Container Scanning introduced in GitLab 16.8 with a flag named container_scanning_continuous_vulnerability_scans. Disabled by default.
• Continuous Container Scanning enabled on GitLab.com, self-managed, and GitLab Dedicated in GitLab 16.10.

Continuous Vulnerability Scanning detects new vulnerabilities outside a pipeline. Your projects are automatically scanned whenever advisories are added to the GitLab Advisory Database, or Trivy DB. Projects that depend on the affected components have new vulnerabilities automatically created.

Continuous Vulnerability Scanning detects vulnerabilities in the latest CycloneDX SBOM reports for the default branch. Dependency Scanning and Container Scanning are used to generate these reports.

Supported component types

Components with the following PURL types are supported:

• composer
• conan
• deb
• gem
• golang
• maven
• npm
• nuget
• pypi

Work to support apk and rpm PURL types is tracked in issue 428703.

Configuration

To enable Continuous Vulnerability Scanning:

• Enable Dependency Scanning, or Container Scanning, and ensure that its prerequisites are met.
• On GitLab self-managed only, you can choose package registry metadata to synchronize in the Admin Area for the GitLab instance. For this data synchronization to work, you must allow outbound network traffic from your GitLab instance to the domain storage.googleapis.com. If you have limited or no network connectivity then refer to the documentation section running in an offline environment for further guidance.

Running in an offline environment

For self-managed GitLab instances in an environment with limited, restricted, or intermittent access to external resources through the internet, some adjustments are required to successfully scan CycloneDX reports for vulnerabilities. For more information, see the offline quick start guide.

Supported languages and package managers

The supported files and versions are the ones supported by Dependency Scanning.

Go pseudo versions are not supported. A project dependency that references a Go pseudo version is never considered as affected. This might result in false negatives.

Checking new vulnerabilities

New vulnerabilities detected by Continuous Vulnerability Scanning are visible on the Vulnerability Report. However, they are not listed on the Dependency List or in the pipeline where the affected SBOM component was detected.

After an advisory is added to the GitLab Advisory Database or Trivy DB, it might take a few hours before the corresponding vulnerabilities are added to your projects.

Contributing to the vulnerability database

To find a vulnerability, you can search the GitLab Advisory Database. You can also submit new vulnerabilities.