OpenSSF Scorecard

<img align="right" src="artwork/openssf_security_compressed.png" width="200" height="400">

Overview

• What Is Scorecard?
• Prominent Scorecard Users
• View a Project's Score
• Scorecard's Public Data

Using Scorecard

• Scorecard GitHub Action
• Scorecard REST API
• Scorecard Badges
• Scorecard Command Line Interface
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
  • Authentication
  • Basic Usage

Checks

• Default Scorecard Checks
• Detailed Check Documentation (Scoring Criteria, Risks, and Remediation)
• Beginner's Guide to Scorecard Checks

Other Important Recommendations

• Two-factor Authentication (2FA)

Scoring

• Aggregate Score

Contribute

• Report Problems
• Code of Conduct
• Contribute to Scorecard
• Add a New Check
• Connect with the Scorecard Community
• Report a Security Issue

FAQ

• FAQ

Overview

What is Scorecard?

We created Scorecard to help open source maintainers improve their security best practices and to help open source consumers judge whether their dependencies are safe.

Scorecard is an automated tool that assesses a number of important heuristics ("checks") associated with software security and assigns each check a score of 0-10. You can use these scores to understand specific areas to improve in order to strengthen the security posture of your project. You can also assess the risks that dependencies introduce, and make informed decisions about accepting these risks, evaluating alternative solutions, or working with the maintainers to make improvements.

The inspiration for Scorecard’s logo: "You passed! All D's ... and an A!"

Project Goals

1. Automate analysis and trust decisions on the security posture of open source projects.

2. Use this data to proactively improve the security posture of the critical projects the world depends on.

3. Act as a measurement tool for existing policies

   If OSS consumers require certain behaviors from their dependencies, Scorecard can be used to measure those. With the V5 release, we see Structured Results as a way of doing this if there is a supported analysis. Instead of relying on an aggregate score of X/10, or a Maintained score of Y/10, an OSS consumer may want to ensure the repo they're depending on isn't archived (which is covered by the archived probe). The OpenSSF takes this approach with its own Security Baseline for projects.

Project Non-Goals

1. To be a definitive report or requirement that all projects should follow.

   Scorecard is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Every step of making our results is opinionated: what checks get included or excluded, the importance of each check, and how scores are calculated. The checks themselves are heuristics; there are false positives and false negatives.

   Whether it’s due to applicability, or feasibility, or a matter of opinion, what's included or excluded from Scorecard results leads to a lot of discussion. It’s impossible to create a Scorecard that satisfies everyone because different audiences will care about different subsets of behavior.

   Aggregate scores in particular tells you nothing about what individual behaviors a repository is or is not doing. Many check scores are aggregated into a single score, and there’s multiple ways of arriving at the same score. These scores change as we add new heuristics or refine the existing ones.

Prominent Scorecard Users

Scorecard has been run on thousands of projects to monitor and track security metrics. Prominent projects that use Scorecard include:

• Tensorflow
• Angular
• Flutter
• sos.dev
• deps.dev

View a Project's Score

To see scores for projects regularly scanned by Scorecard, navigate to the webviewer. You can also replace the placeholder text (platform, user/org, and repository name) in the following template link to generate a custom Scorecard link for a repo: https://scorecard.dev/viewer/?uri=<github_or_gitlab>.com/<user_name_or_org>/<repository_name>

For example:

• https://scorecard.dev/viewer/?uri=github.com/ossf/scorecard
• https://scorecard.dev/viewer/?uri=gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient

To view scores for projects not included in the webviewer, use the Scorecard CLI.

Public Data

We run a weekly Scorecard scan of the 1 million most critical open source projects judged by their direct dependencies and publish the results in a BigQuery public dataset.

This data is available in the public BigQuery dataset openssf:scorecardcron.scorecard-v2. The latest results are available in the BigQuery view openssf:scorecardcron.scorecard-v2_latest.

You can query the data using BigQuery Explorer by navigating to Add Data > Star a project by name > 'openssf'. For example, you may be interested in how a project's score has changed over time:

SELECT date, score FROM `openssf.scorecardcron.scorecard-v2` WHERE repo.name="github.com/ossf/scorecard" ORDER BY date ASC

You can extract the latest results to Google Cloud storage in JSON format using the bq tool:

# Get the latest PARTITION_ID
bq query --nouse_legacy_sql 'SELECT partition_id FROM
openssf.scorecardcron.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PARTITIONS WHERE table_name="scorecard-v2"
AND partition_id!="__NULL__" ORDER BY partition_id DESC
LIMIT 1'

# Extract to GCS
bq extract --destination_format=NEWLINE_DELIMITED_JSON
'openssf:scorecardcron.scorecard-v2$<partition_id>' gs://bucket-name/filename-*.json

The list of projects that are checked is available in the cron/internal/data/projects.csv file in this repository. If you would like us to track more, please feel free to send a Pull Request with others. Currently, this list is derived from projects hosted on GitHub ONLY. We do plan to expand them in near future to account for projects hosted on other source control systems.

Using Scorecard

Scorecard GitHub Action

The easiest way to use Scorecard on GitHub projects you own is with the Scorecard GitHub Action. The Action runs on any repository change and issues alerts that maintainers can view in the repository’s Security tab. For more information, see the Scorecard GitHub Action installation instructions.

Scorecard REST API

To query pre-calculated scores of OSS projects, use the REST API. Scores calculated from our weekly scan omit the CI-Tests, Contributors, and Dependency-Update-Tool checks due to the API costs associated with running them at scale.

API results are cached with a CDN (thanks to Fastly and their Fast Forward program). Results are purged from the CDN when new results are available, but if you notice issues with stale data, please open an issue.

To enable your project to be available on the REST API, set publish_results: true in the Scorecard GitHub Action setting.

Data provided by the REST API is licensed under the CDLA Permissive 2.0.

Scorecard Badges

Enabling publish_results: true in Scorecard GitHub Actions also allows maintainers to display a Scorecard badge on their repository t