The rollup took the highest fix version across a component's advisories. That
is wrong whenever an advisory is patched on more than one release branch.
nanoid is the case that exposed it. Both advisories against it are fixed on two
branches - 3.3.16 and 5.1.16, 3.3.18 and 5.1.6 - and the rollup recommended
5.1.16 with a MAJOR warning. But nanoid is transitive, pulled in by postcss at
`^3.3.11`, a range no 5.x release can satisfy. The recommendation was not merely
a bigger job than necessary, it was unreachable: the actual target is 3.3.18, a
patch inside the existing range.
Per advisory the target is now the lowest published fix above the version in
use; per component it is the highest of those, since one upgrade has to satisfy
every advisory against it. Fixes on older branches are skipped rather than
offered as a downgrade - axios advisories list 0.30.x fixes that would have been
a downgrade from 1.13.2.
This also gives the MAJOR label meaning. It now fires only when no fix exists on
the current branch, rather than whenever some branch happened to be higher.
The SBOM was generated and installed onto every server, and nothing read it.
"Are we exposed to this advisory" was still a person going and looking, which
meant it happened when somebody remembered to.
scripts/scan_sbom.py queries OSV.dev by purl - no account, no API key, no agent,
no vulnerability database to maintain on a box that cannot reach the internet.
The SBOM is already the input OSV wants, so this is a lookup against what
shipped rather than a second scan of the tree that could disagree with it.
Three decisions worth recording:
Shipped and build-only findings are both reported, but only shipped ones can
fail a build. Two thirds of the components here are build tooling the SBOM
already marks scope 'excluded', and the highest-severity match in the whole tree
today is a CRITICAL against the test runner. A gate that fails a release over
that trains everybody to bypass it, and then it catches nothing.
Severity is taken from the advisory, never derived. Where there is only a CVSS
vector the report says UNKNOWN, which is shown and never gates. A guessed score
is worse than an honest gap because somebody would act on it.
The allowlist is a record rather than a mute button: each entry carries the
reason, the accepter, the date, and what would invalidate the reasoning. The
first entry is a worked example - a PyJWT algorithm-confusion advisory that
needs both mixed algorithm families and a raw JSON JWK as the key, and this
application configures neither.
The report ends with a per-component upgrade rollup, since that is the part
somebody acts on. A target on a different major version is labelled rather than
listed beside patch bumps as though the two cost the same.
Current state: 8 shipped components have fixes available, none of them
exploitable through a path this application opens today.
