Switch to NVD API for advisory generation
Problem to solve
At the moment, we download the NVD JSON feed on a daily basis with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/secure/vulnerability-research/advisories/nvd-mirror-json which we then use for advisory generation. This limitation can delay advisories in two ways:
- time frame NVD requires to update the file on their end (every 12h)
- time frame in which the files are picked up by our scheduled pipeline (every 12h)
By switching over the the NVD API and by increasing the frequency with which we are checking for updates, we should be able to eliminate delay 1 and to reduce delay 2 significantly so ideally we could reduce the delay by 24h.
Proposal
Use the NVD API to include the most recent CVEs into our advisory workflow.
For example when requesting all advisories that have been published on Dec, 8th, the API request https://services.nvd.nist.gov/rest/json/cves/2.0/?pubStartDate=2022-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00&pubEndDate=2022-12-08T23:59:59.999-05:00 gives us access to CVEs that were not available in the JSON feed that was publicly available at the same time.
We can measure the improvement by checking the time delay, i.e., difference between the publication date and merge date. We should be able to observe a drop in the delay after switching over to the API.
Intended users
Personas are described at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/roles-personas/
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Sidney (Systems Administrator)
- Sam (Security Analyst)
- Rachel (Release Manager)
- Alex (Security Operations Engineer)
- Simone (Software Engineer in Test)
/cc @gitlab-org/secure/vulnerability-research @mark.art @sam.white @wayne
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