README.md

OpenVEX Discovery Module

This repository contains the OpenVEX discovery module. The module defines a discovery agent that has pluggable modules to look for OpenVEX data associated with a software component.

Example Usage

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"os"

	"github.com/openvex/discovery/pkg/discovery"
)

func main() {

	// Create a new agent
	agent := discovery.NewAgent()

	// Use the agent to probe the Kubernetes API server container image:
	vexDocuments, err := agent.ProbePurl(
		"pkg:oci/kube-apiserver?repository_url=registry.k8s.io&tag=v1.28.3",
	)

	if err != nil {
		fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, err.Error())
		os.Exit(1)
	}

	// The prober returns a document collection. Print how many we got.
	fmt.Printf(
		"Found %d OpenVEX documents associated to package URL\n", len(vexDocuments),
	)

	for _, d := range vexDocuments {
		fmt.Printf(" > Document ID: %s\n", d.ID)
	}
}

Operation

Just as SBOMs, VEX data can be stored in a variety of locations: git repositories. oci registries, storage buckets, webservers, etc. Some locations make sense for some software artifact types, some for others. Data can be referenced for example, in another document like an SBOM or an OpenVEX document and may be living in a different repository. The distributed nature of VEX makes this disemination possible.

The OpenVEX discovery agent has two main jobs:

1. Understanding what kind of repositories may contain OpenVEX data for different component types.
2. Calling the relevant probers to look for and retrieve any OpenVEX documents in locations associated with an artifact.

Module Status

We are slowly building backend drivers to support various use cases. The initial release supports package urls of type oci but we will constantly add more. If you want support for other purl types, feel free to open a pull request or file an issue!