You can seamlessly integrate JFrog Xray security and compliance scanning in your organization's CI/CD pipeline to make sure that build jobs containing vulnerabilities are stopped early on in the process. As part of a fully automated process, Xray receives information about a build that has just been run by your CI server, it then runs a deep recursive scan on the build down to the deepest level dependency, and if any vulnerabilities are found, Xray will return an indication to the calling CI server.
Failing a build job that includes build artifacts or dependencies with vulnerabilities is an effective way to prevent any infected builds from reaching your production systems. There are organization policies that force developers to scan every build they run and fail them immediately if infected artifacts are found. However, this mode of operation has been found to inhibit developers' creativity and stunt their productivity, and often, developers find a way around this kind of restriction. A better solution is to periodically run this kind of scan once the code of several developers has been merged. For example, during a nightly build run by an organization's CI server.
How Xray Scans Builds
There are three players in this process:
Your CI Build Currently supported for Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Bamboo, TeamCity and JFrog CLI.
The CI build sends a request to Xray, through JFrog Artifactory, for the build to be scanned. If the scan detects a vulnerability, the CI build can take appropriate action.
JFrog Artifactory
JFrog Artifactory serves as a mediator between the CI server and Xray. It does nothing more than pass information between one and the other.
JFrog Xray
Upon request, if Xray has defined watches with Actions to fail a build job, it will scan the build, and respond with a message that the build job should fail if a vulnerability is detected in the build artifact or one of its dependencies.
The following workflow shows how Xray scans your builds.
The CI build runs.
Assuming the build is successful, the CI build publishes the build-info to Artifactory.
Xray automatically scans your new build artifacts and dependencies..
The CI build passes a request to Artifactory to scan the build.
Artifactory passes a request to scan the build through Xray's scanBuild REST API endpoint.
Xray scans the build according to a defined Watch with a Fail Build Job action.
Multiple watches or no watches?
You may define multiple Watches with a Fail Build Job Action, each with its own criteria (i.e. Artifact Filters and/or Issue Filters) that should trigger an alert. All of these Watches are applied each time a build is scanned.
If Xray receives a scanBuild request, and there are no Watches defined with a Fail Build Job Action, Xray will always respond with an indication to fail the build job, even if no vulnerabilities are found in the build artifacts or their dependencies.
If a build artifact or dependency meets the conditions (filters) defined in the Watch, Xray triggers an alert and...
Xray responds to the scanBuild request indicating that the build job should fail.
All Alerts in one response
The response includes the details of all Alerts generated by all Watches that include a Fail Build Job Action.
Artifactory passes the response back to the CI Server.
The CI Server fails the build job.
Watch the Screencast
Watch this screencast to learn how to get the best of two worlds - developer productivity and safety, by scanning the results of every build for security vulnerabilities, license compliance issues and more with JFrog Xray.