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Security vulnerabilities

Source: vignettes/security_vulnerabilities.Rmd
security_vulnerabilities.Rmd

Introduction

The security vulnerabilities feature checks for known, publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in the R package being assessed. It is accessed through:

It also runs automatically as part of a full assessment via risk_assess_pkg() / assess_pkg().

Where the data comes from

Advisories are retrieved from the Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) database (https://osv.dev) using a POST request to the query endpoint https://api.osv.dev/v1/query. For R packages, OSV serves advisories from the R Consortium r-advisory-database, which carry RSEC-* identifiers.

The package is queried by name only within the "CRAN" ecosystem. All advisories for the package are fetched, then filtered locally against the installed version. Querying by name (rather than name + version) avoids missing range-based advisories that a version-scoped OSV query can silently omit.

Load the package

Retrieving vulnerabilities directly 

vulns <- get_security_vulnerabilities("commonmark", "1.7")
vulns

The function returns a data frame with one row per advisory and the following columns:

  • id — advisory identifier (e.g. RSEC-2023-6)
  • summary — short vulnerability type
  • details — full description
  • introduced — version the issue was introduced
  • fixed — version the issue was fixed
  • modified, published — advisory timestamps

If no advisories apply, a zero-row data frame with the same columns is returned. Omitting the version returns every advisory known for the package.

Within a full assessment

When you assess a package, the vulnerabilities are stored in the results object:

result <- risk_assess_pkg(package = "commonmark", version = "1.7")
result$results$vulnerabilities

How results are reported

Summary report — vulnerabilities appear as a single metric, “Security Vulnerabilities”, showing the count of advisories found. Any count of one or more is scored High risk; zero is scored Low. This contributes to the overall recommendation alongside the other risk metrics.

HTML report — when advisories are found, the report renders a red-headed, searchable table listing every advisory (ID, Summary, Details, Introduced, Fixed, Modified, Published). When none are found, a green “No security vulnerabilities” banner is shown instead.

Limitations

  • Only the "CRAN" ecosystem is queried; Bioconductor is not auto-detected.
  • The feature requires network access to the OSV API.
  • API failures return an empty result, so absence of rows is not by itself a guarantee that a package is free of vulnerabilities — check the console messages.
  • Vulnerability scoring is not configurable through risk-definition.json at the moment.