Vulnerability Report (ULTIMATE)

The Vulnerability Report provides information about vulnerabilities from scans of the default branch. It contains cumulative results of all successful jobs, regardless of whether the pipeline was successful.

The scan results from a pipeline are only ingested after all the jobs in the pipeline complete. Partial results for a pipeline with jobs in progress can be seen in the pipeline security tab.

The report is available for users with the correct role on projects, groups, and the Security Center.

At all levels, the Vulnerability Report contains:

• Totals of vulnerabilities per severity level.
• Filters for common vulnerability attributes.
• Details of each vulnerability, presented in tabular layout.

The Activity column contains icons to indicate the activity, if any, taken on the vulnerability in that row:

• Issues {issues}: Links to issues created for the vulnerability. For more details, read Create an issue for a vulnerability.
• Wrench {admin}: The vulnerability has been remediated.
• False positive {false-positive}: The scanner determined this vulnerability to be a false positive.

Project-level Vulnerability Report

Introduced in GitLab 11.1.

At the project level, the Vulnerability Report also contains:

• A time stamp showing when it was updated, including a link to the latest pipeline.
• The number of failures that occurred in the most recent pipeline. Select the failure notification to view the Failed jobs tab of the pipeline's page.

View the project-level vulnerability report

To view the project-level vulnerability report:

1. On the top bar, select Menu > Projects and find your project.
2. On the left sidebar, select Security & Compliance > Vulnerability report.

Vulnerability Report actions

From the Vulnerability Report you can:

• Filter the list of vulnerabilities.
• View more details about a vulnerability.
• View vulnerable source location (if available).
• View an issue raised for a vulnerability.
• Change the status of vulnerabilities.
• Export details of vulnerabilities.
• Manually add a vulnerability finding.

Vulnerability Report filters

You can filter the Vulnerability Report to narrow focus on only vulnerabilities matching specific criteria.

The available filters are:

• Status: Detected, Confirmed, Dismissed, Resolved.
• Severity: Critical, High, Medium, Low, Info, Unknown.
• Tool: For more details, see Tool filter.
• Project: For more details, see Project filter.
• Activity: For more details, see Activity filter.

The filters' criteria are combined to show only vulnerabilities matching all criteria. An exception to this behavior is the Activity filter. For more details about how it works, see Activity filter.

Filter the list of vulnerabilities

To filter the list of vulnerabilities:

1. Select a filter.
2. Select values from the dropdown list.
3. Repeat the above steps for each desired filter.

After each filter is selected:

• The list of matching vulnerabilities is updated.
• The vulnerability severity totals are updated.

Tool filter

The third-party tool filter was introduced in GitLab 13.12.

The tool filter allows you to focus on vulnerabilities detected by selected tools.

When using the tool filter, you can choose:

• All tools (default).
• Individual GitLab-provided tools.
• Any integrated third-party tool.

For details of each of the available tools, see Security scanning tools.

Project filter

The content of the Project filter depends on the current level:

• Security Center: Only projects you've added to your personal Security Center.
• Group level: All projects in the group.
• Project level: Not applicable.

Activity filter

Introduced in GitLab 13.9

The Activity filter behaves differently from the other filters. The selected values form mutually exclusive sets to allow for precisely locating the desired vulnerability records. Additionally, not all options can be selected in combination.

Selection behavior when using the Activity filter:

• All: Vulnerabilities with any Activity status (same as ignoring this filter). Selecting this deselects any other Activity filter options.
• No activity: Only vulnerabilities without either an associated issue or that are no longer detected. Selecting this deselects any other Activity filter options.
• With issues: Only vulnerabilities with one or more associated issues. Does not include vulnerabilities that also are no longer detected.
• No longer detected: Only vulnerabilities that are no longer detected in the latest pipeline scan of the default branch. Does not include vulnerabilities with one or more associated issues.
• With issues and No longer detected: Only vulnerabilities that have one or more associated issues and also are no longer detected in the latest pipeline scan of the default branch.

View details of a vulnerability

To view more details of a vulnerability, select the vulnerability's Description. The vulnerability's details page is opened.

View vulnerable source location

Introduced in GitLab 13.10.

Some security scanners output the filename and line number of a potential vulnerability. When that information is available, the vulnerability's details include a link to the relevant file, in the default branch.

To view the relevant file, select the filename in the vulnerability's details.

View issues raised for a vulnerability

The Activity column indicates the number of issues that have been created for the vulnerability. Hover over an Activity entry and select a link go to that issue. The status of whether the issue is open or closed also displays in the hover menu.

If Jira issue support is enabled, the issue link found in the Activity entry links out to the issue in Jira. Unlike GitLab issues, the status of whether a Jira issue is Open or Closed does not display in the GitLab UI.

Change status of vulnerabilities

Introduced in GitLab 13.10, all statuses became selectable.

From the Vulnerability Report you can change the status of one or more vulnerabilities.

To change the status of vulnerabilities in the table:

1. Select the checkbox beside each vulnerability you want to update the status of. To select all, select the checkbox in the table header.
2. In the Set status dropdown list, select the desired status.
3. Select Change status.

Dismissing a vulnerability

When you evaluate a vulnerability and decide it requires no more action, you can mark it as Dismissed. Dismissed vulnerabilities don't appear in the merge request security widget when detected in future scans.

When a vulnerability is dismissed, a record is made of:

• Who dismissed it.
• Date and time when it was dismissed.
• Optionally, a reason why it was dismissed.

Vulnerability records cannot be deleted, so a permanent record always remains.

If a vulnerability is dismissed in error, reverse the dismissal by changing its status.

Export vulnerability details

• Introduced in the Security Center (previously known as the Instance Security Dashboard) and project-level Vulnerability Report (previously known as the Project Security Dashboard) in GitLab 13.0.
• Added to the group-level Vulnerability Report in GitLab 13.1.

You can export details of the vulnerabilities listed in the Vulnerability Report. The export format is CSV (comma separated values). Note that all vulnerabilities are included because filters don't apply to the export.

Fields included are:

• Group name
• Project name
• Scanner type
• Scanner name
• Status
• Vulnerability
• Basic details
• Additional information
• Severity
• CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)
• CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration)
• Other identifiers

NOTE: Full details are available through our Job Artifacts API. Use one of the gl-*-report.json report filenames in place of *artifact_path to obtain, for example, the path of files in which vulnerabilities were detected.

Export details in CSV format

To export details of all vulnerabilities listed in the Vulnerability Report, select Export.

The details are retrieved from the database, then the CSV file is downloaded to your local computer.

NOTE: It may take several minutes for the download to start if your project contains thousands of vulnerabilities. Don't close the page until the download finishes.

Dismiss a vulnerability

The option of adding a dismissal reason was introduced in GitLab 12.0.

You can dismiss a vulnerability for the entire project:

1. Select the vulnerability in the Security Dashboard.
2. In the top-right, from the Status selector menu, select Dismissed.
3. Optional. Add a reason for the dismissal and select Save comment.

To undo this action, select a different status from the same menu.

Manually add a vulnerability finding

• Introduced in GitLab 14.9. Disabled by default.
• Enabled on GitLab.com in GitLab 14.10.
• Feature flag new_vulnerability_form removed in GitLab 15.0.

To add a new vulnerability finding from your project level Vulnerability Report page:

1. On the top bar, select Menu > Projects and find your project.
2. On the left sidebar, select Security & Compliance > Vulnerability Report.
3. Select Submit Vulnerability.
4. Complete the fields and submit the form.

You will be brought to the newly created vulnerability's detail page. Manually created records appear in the Group, Project, and Security Center Vulnerability Reports. To filter them, use the Generic Tool filter.

Operational vulnerabilities

Introduced in GitLab 14.6.

The Operational vulnerabilities tab lists vulnerabilities found by Operational container scanning. This tab appears on the project, group, and Security Center vulnerability reports.