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Response snapshot Oct 27, 2026, 01:13 UTC

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Advisorygoogle-security-osv-scalibr-library-for-software-7aefc83b5a81

OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis

Posted by Erik Varga, Vulnerability Management, and Rex Pan, Open Source Security Team In December 2022, we announced OSV-Scanner , a tool to enable developers to easily scan for vulnerabilities in their open source dependencies.

At a glance

Sources
1 source

What to do

Read the exact official research article before applying its defensive techniques or drawing conclusions.

Read Google Security Research: OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis (opens a new tab)

What happened

Posted by Erik Varga, Vulnerability Management, and Rex Pan, Open Source Security Team

In December 2022, we announced OSV-Scanner , a tool to enable developers to easily scan for vulnerabilities in their open source dependencies. Together with the open source community, we’ve continued to build this tool, adding remediation features , as well as expanding ecosystem support to 11 programming languages and 20 package manager formats.

Today, we’re excited to release OSV-SCALIBR (Software Composition Analysis LIBRary), an extensible library for SCA and file system scanning. OSV-SCALIBR combines Google’s internal vulnerability management expertise into one scanning library with significant new capabilities such as:

SCA for installed packages, standalone binaries, as well as source code

Continue reading

OSes package scanning on Linux (COS, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and much more), Windows, and Mac

Artifact and lockfile scanning in major language ecosystems (Go, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and much more)

Vulnerability scanning tools such as weak credential detectors for Linux, Windows, and Mac

SBOM generation in SPDX and CycloneDX, the two most popular document formats

Optimization for on-host scanning of resource constrained environments where performance and low resource consumption is critical

OSV-SCALIBR is now the primary SCA engine used within Google for live hosts, code repos, and containers. It’s been used and tested extensively across many different products and internal tools to help generate SBOMs, find vulnerabilities, and help protect our users’ data at Google scale.

We offer OSV-SCALIBR primarily as an open source Go library today, and we're working on adding its new capabilities into OSV-Scanner as the primary CLI interface.

Using OSV-SCALIBR as a library

All of OSV-SCALIBR's capabilities are modularized into plugins for software extraction and vulnerability detection which are very simple to expand .You can use OSV-SCALIBR as a library to:

1.Generate SBOMs from the build artifacts and code repos on your live host:

import (

"context"

"github.com/google/osv-scalibr"

"github.com/google/osv-scalibr/converter"

"github.com/google/osv-scalibr/extractor/filesystem/list"

"github.com/google/osv-scalibr/fs"

"github.com/google/osv-scalibr/plugin"

spdx "github.com/spdx/tools-golang/spdx/v2/v2_3"

)

func GenSBOM ( ctx context . Context ) * spdx . Document {

capab := & plugin . Capabilities { OS : plugin . OSLinux }

cfg := & scalibr . ScanConfig {

ScanRoots : fs . RealFSScanRoots ( "/" ),

FilesystemExtractors : list . FromCapabilities( capab) ,

Capabilities : capab ,

}

result := scalibr . New (). Scan ( ctx , cfg )

return converter . ToSPDX23 ( result , converter . SPDXConfig {})

}

2. Scan a git repo for SBOMs:

Simply replace "/" with the path to your git repo. Also take a look at the various language extractors to enable for code scanning.

3. Scan a remote container for SBOMs:

Replace the scan config from the above code snippet with

import (

...

"github.com/google/go-containerregistry/pkg/authn"

"github.com/google/go-containerregistry/pkg/v1/remote"

"github.com/google/osv-scalibr/artifact/image"

...

)

...

filesys , _ := image . NewFromRemoteName (

"alpine:latest" ,

remote . WithAuthFromKeychain ( authn . DefaultKeychain ),

)

cfg := & scalibr . ScanConfig {

ScanRoots : [] * fs . ScanRoot {{ FS : filesys }},

...

}

4. Find vulnerabilities on your filesystem or a remote container:

Extract the PURLs from the SCALIBR inventory results from the previous steps:

import (

...

"github.com/google/osv-scalibr/converter"

...

)

...

result := scalibr . New (). Scan ( ctx , cfg )

for _ , i := range result . Inventories {

fmt . Println ( converter . ToPURL ( i ))

}

And send them to osv.dev , e.g.

$ curl -d '{"package": {"purl": "pkg:npm/dojo@1.2.3"}}' "https://api.osv.dev/v1/query"

See the usage docs for more details.

OSV-Scanner + OSV-SCALIBR

Users looking for an out-of-the-box vulnerability scanning CLI tool should check out OSV-Scanner , which already provides comprehensive language package scanning capabilities using much of the same extraction as OSV-SCALIBR.

Some of OSV-SCALIBR’s capabilities are not yet available in OSV-Scanner, but we’re currently working on integrating OSV-SCALIBR more deeply into OSV-Scanner. This will make more and more of OSV-SCALIBR’s capabilities available in OSV-Scanner in the next few months, including installed package extraction, weak credentials scanning, SBOM generation, and more.

Look out soon for an announcement of OSV-Scanner V2 with many of these new features available. OSV-Scanner will become the primary frontend to the OSV-SCALIBR library for users who require a CLI interface. Existing users of OSV-Scanner can continue to use the tool the same way, with backwards compatibility maintained for all existing use cases.

For installation and usage instructions, have a look at OSV-Scanner’s documentation here .

What’s next

In addition to making all of OSV-SCALIBR’s features available in OSV-Scanner, we're also working on additional new capabilities. Here's some of the things you can expect:

Support for more OS and language ecosystems, both for regular extraction and for Guided Remediation

Layer attribution and base image identification for container scanning

Reachability analysis to reduce false positive vulnerability matches

More vulnerability and misconfiguration detectors for Windows

More weak credentials detectors

We hope that this library helps developers and organizations to secure their software and encourages the open source community to contribute back by sharing new plugins on top of OSV-SCALIBR.

If you have any questions or if you would like to contribute, don't hesitate to reach out to us at osv-discuss@google.com or by posting an issue in our issue tracker .

Sources

  1. Primary source

    Google Security Research: OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis (opens a new tab)

    Exact official article/advisory identified by the feed; title, source dates, and any supplied article excerpt.

    Published Checked

  2. Primary source

    Google Security Research syndication feed (opens a new tab)

    The RSS/Atom/RDF entry supplied this exact link and any available title, date, and excerpt.

    Published Date not suppliedChecked

Cite this record

For factual claims, cite the primary sources above; cite KEVWire for its compilation, dates, and classifications.

APA

KEVWire. (2025, January 16). OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis. https://kevwire.com/record/google-security-osv-scalibr-library-for-software-7aefc83b5a81

MLA

"OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis." KEVWire, 16 Jan. 2025, kevwire.com/record/google-security-osv-scalibr-library-for-software-7aefc83b5a81.

Chicago

KEVWire. "OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis." Last modified January 16, 2025. https://kevwire.com/record/google-security-osv-scalibr-library-for-software-7aefc83b5a81.

Evidence summary (plain text)

OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis (Jan 16, 2025).
Posted by Erik Varga, Vulnerability Management, and Rex Pan, Open Source Security Team 

 In December 2022, we announced OSV-Scanner , a tool to enable developers to easily scan for vulnerabilities in their open source dependencies. Together with the open source community, we’ve continued to build this tool, adding remediation features , as well as expanding ecosystem support to 11 programming languages and 20 package manager formats. 

 Today, we’re excited to release OSV-SCALIBR (Software Composition Analysis LIBRary), an extensible library for SCA and file system scanning. OSV-SCALIBR combines Google’s internal vulnerability management expertise into one scanning library with significant new capabilities such as: 

 SCA for installed packages, standalone binaries, as well as source code 

 OSes package scanning on Linux (COS, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and much more), Windows, and Mac 

 Artifact and lockfile scanning in major language ecosystems (Go, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and much more) 

 Vulnerability scanning tools such as weak credential detectors for Linux, Windows, and Mac 

 SBOM generation in SPDX and CycloneDX, the two most popular document formats 

 Optimization for on-host scanning of resource constrained environments where performance and low resource consumption is critical 

 OSV-SCALIBR is now the primary SCA engine used within Google for live hosts, code repos, and containers. It’s been used and tested extensively across many different products and internal tools to help generate SBOMs, find vulnerabilities, and help protect our users’ data at Google scale. 

 We offer OSV-SCALIBR primarily as an open source Go library today, and we're working on adding its new capabilities into OSV-Scanner as the primary CLI interface. 

 Using OSV-SCALIBR as a library 

 All of OSV-SCALIBR's capabilities are modularized into plugins for software extraction and vulnerability detection which are very simple to expand .You can use OSV-SCALIBR as a library to
Sources:
Google Security Research: OSV-SCALIBR: A library for Software Composition Analysis: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/01/osv-scalibr-library-for-software.html
Google Security Research syndication feed: https://security.googleblog.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&redirect=false&max-results=50
Record ID: google-security-osv-scalibr-library-for-software-7aefc83b5a81.
Record origin: Ingested record.
AI evidence: Not assessed.
About this data

This record was ingested from a data source. Retrieved: Oct 27, 2026, 00:35 UTC. Ingestion is not an independent editorial investigation.

This is an excerpt of official research, not a reproduced result or evidence of exposure to a scored vulnerability.

Technology tags indicate possible relevance, not verified exposure. Confirm the affected product, version, and configuration against your own inventory; KEVWire does not scan your systems.

A personal reading checklist on this device, not verified remediation.

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