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Go

Overview

Trivy supports two types of Go scanning, Go Modules and binaries built by Go.

The following scanners are supported.

Artifact SBOM Vulnerability License
Modules ✓ ✓ ✓
Binaries ✓ ✓ -

The table below provides an outline of the features Trivy offers.

Artifact Offline1 Dev dependencies Dependency graph Stdlib Detection Priority
Modules ✅ Include ✅ ✅ ✅
Binaries ✅ Exclude - ✅ Not needed

Note

When scanning Go projects (go.mod or binaries built with Go), Trivy scans only dependencies of the project, and does not detect vulnerabilities of application itself. For example, when scanning the Docker project (Docker's source code with go.mod or the Docker binary), Trivy might find vulnerabilities in Go modules that Docker depends on, but won't find vulnerabilities of Docker itself. Moreover, when scanning the Trivy project, which happens to use Docker, Docker's vulnerabilities might be detected as dependencies of Trivy.

Data Sources

The data sources are listed here. Trivy uses Go Vulnerability Database for standard library and uses GitHub Advisory Database for other Go modules.

Go Module

Depending on Go versions, the required files are different.

Version Required files Offline
>=1.17 go.mod ✅
<1.17 go.mod, go.sum ✅

In Go 1.17+ projects, Trivy uses go.mod for direct/indirect dependencies. On the other hand, it uses go.mod for direct dependencies and go.sum for indirect dependencies in Go 1.16 or less.

Go 1.17+ holds actually needed indirect dependencies in go.mod, and it reduces false detection. go.sum in Go 1.16 or less contains all indirect dependencies that are even not needed for compiling. If you want to have better detection, please consider updating the Go version in your project.

Note

The Go version doesn't mean your Go tool version, but the Go version in your go.mod.

module github.com/aquasecurity/trivy

go 1.18

require (
        github.com/CycloneDX/cyclonedx-go v0.5.0
        ...
)

To update the Go version in your project, you need to run the following command.

$ go mod tidy -go=1.18

Main Module

Trivy scans only dependencies of the project, and does not detect vulnerabilities of the main module. For example, when scanning the Docker project (Docker's source code with go.mod), Trivy might find vulnerabilities in Go modules that Docker depends on, but won't find vulnerabilities of Docker itself. Moreover, when scanning the Trivy project, which happens to use Docker, Docker's vulnerabilities might be detected as dependencies of Trivy.

Standard Library

Detecting the version of Go used in the project can be tricky. The go.mod file include hints that allows Trivy to guess the Go version but it eventually depends on the Go tool version in the build environment. Since this strategy is not fully deterministic and accurate, it is enabled only in --detection-priority comprehensive mode. When enabled, Trivy detects stdlib version as the minimum between the go and the toolchain directives in the go.mod file. To obtain reproducible scan results Trivy doesn't check the locally installed version of Go.

Note

Trivy detects stdlib only for Go 1.21 or higher.

The version from the go line (for Go 1.20 or early) is not a minimum required version. For details, see this.

It possibly produces false positives. See the caveat for details.

License

To identify licenses, you need to download modules to local cache beforehand, such as go mod download, go mod tidy, etc. Trivy traverses $GOPATH/pkg/mod and collects those extra information.

Dependency Graph

Same as licenses, you need to download modules to local cache beforehand.

Go Binary

Trivy scans Go binaries when it encounters them during scans such as container images or file systems. When scanning binaries built by Go, Trivy finds dependencies and Go version information as embedded in the binary by Go tool at build time.

$ trivy rootfs ./your_binary

Note

It doesn't work with UPX-compressed binaries.

Main Module

Go binaries installed using the go install command contains correct (semver) version for the main module and therefor are detected by Trivy. In other cases, Go uses the (devel) version2. In this case, Trivy will attempt to parse any -ldflags as it's a common practice to pass versions this way. If unsuccessful, the version will be empty3.

Standard Library

Trivy detects the Go version used to compile the binary and detects its vulnerabilities in the standard libraries. It possibly produces false positives. See the caveat for details.

Caveats

Stdlib Vulnerabilities

Trivy does not know if or how you use stdlib functions, therefore it is possible that stdlib vulnerabilities are not applicable to your use case. There are a few ways to mitigate this:

  1. Analyze vulnerability reachability using a tool such as govulncheck. This will ensure that reported vulnerabilities are applicable to your project.
  2. Suppress non-applicable vulnerabilities using either ignore file for self-use or VEX Hub for public use.

Empty Version

As described in the Main Module section, the main module of Go binaries might have an empty version. Also, dependencies replaced with local ones will have an empty version.

  1. It doesn't require the Internet access. ↩

  2. See https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy/issues/1837#issuecomment-1832523477 ↩

  3. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/63432#issuecomment-1751610604 ↩