Notifications

Dependency-Track includes a robust and configurable notification framework capable of alerting users or systems to the presence of newly discovered vulnerabilities, previously known vulnerable components that are added to projects, as well as providing notifications on various system and error conditions.

Scopes #

Dependency-Track notifications come in two flavors (scopes):

Scope	Description
SYSTEM	Notifications on system-level informational and error conditions
PORTFOLIO	Notifications on objects in the portfolio such as vulnerabilities and audit decisions

Levels #

Notifications can have one of three possible levels:

INFORMATIONAL
WARNING
ERROR

Notification levels behave identical to logging levels:

Configuring a rule for level INFORMATIONAL will match notifications of level INFORMATIONAL, WARNING, and ERROR
Configuring a rule for level WARNING will match notifications of level WARNING and ERROR
Configuring a rule for level ERROR will match notifications of level ERROR

Groups #

Each scope contains a set of notification groups that can be subscribed to. Some groups contain notifications of multiple levels, while others can only ever have a single level.

Scope	Group	Level(s)	Description
SYSTEM	ANALYZER	(Any)	Notifications generated as a result of interacting with an external source of vulnerability intelligence
SYSTEM	DATASOURCE_MIRRORING	(Any)	Notifications generated when performing mirroring of one of the supported datasources such as the NVD
SYSTEM	INDEXING_SERVICE	(Any)	Notifications generated as a result of performing maintenance on Dependency-Tracks internal index used for global searching
SYSTEM	FILE_SYSTEM	(Any)	Notifications generated as a result of a file system operation. These are typically only generated on error conditions
SYSTEM	REPOSITORY	(Any)	Notifications generated as a result of interacting with one of the supported repositories such as Maven Central, RubyGems, or NPM
SYSTEM	USER_CREATED	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated as a result of a user creation
SYSTEM	USER_DELETED	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated as a result of a user deletion
PORTFOLIO	NEW_VULNERABILITY	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated whenever a new vulnerability is identified
PORTFOLIO	NEW_VULNERABLE_DEPENDENCY	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated as a result of a vulnerable component becoming a dependency of a project
PORTFOLIO	GLOBAL_AUDIT_CHANGE	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated whenever an analysis or suppression state has changed on a finding from a component (global)
PORTFOLIO	PROJECT_AUDIT_CHANGE	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated whenever an analysis or suppression state has changed on a finding from a project
PORTFOLIO	BOM_CONSUMED	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated whenever a supported BOM is ingested and identified
PORTFOLIO	BOM_PROCESSED	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated after a supported BOM is ingested, identified, and successfully processed
PORTFOLIO	BOM_PROCESSING_FAILED	ERROR	Notifications generated whenever a BOM upload process fails
PORTFOLIO	BOM_VALIDATION_FAILED	ERROR	Notifications generated whenever an invalid BOM is uploaded
PORTFOLIO	POLICY_VIOLATION	INFORMATIONAL	Notifications generated whenever a policy violation is identified

Configuring Publishers #

A notification publisher is a Dependency-Track concept allowing users to describe the structure of a notification (i.e. MIME type, template) and how to send a notification (i.e. publisher class). The following notification publishers are included by default :

Publisher	Description
Slack	Publishes notifications to Slack channels
Teams	Publishes notifications to Microsoft Teams channels
Mattermost	Publishes notifications to Mattermost channels
WebEx	Publishes notifications to Cisco WebEx channels
Webhook	Publishes notifications to a configurable endpoint
Email	Sends notifications to an email address
Console	Displays notifications on the system console
Jira	Publishes notifications to Jira

Templating #

Dependency-Track uses Pebble Templates to generate notifications. The template context is enhanced with the following variables :

Variable	Type	Description
timestampEpochSecond	long	The notification timestamp
timestamp	string	The notification local date time in ISO 8601 format (i.e. uuuu-MM-dd’T’HH:mm:ss.SSSSSSSSS)
notification.level	enum	One of INFORMATIONAL, WARNING, or ERROR
notification.scope	string	The high-level type of notification. One of SYSTEM or PORTFOLIO
notification.group	string	The specific type of notification
notification.title	string	The notification title
notification.content	string	The notification content
notification.timestamp	LocalDateTime	The notification local date time
notification.subject	Object	An optional object containing specifics of the notification
baseUrl	string	Dependency Track base url
subject	Specific	An optional object containing specifics of the notification. It is casted whereas notification.subject is a generic Object
subjectJson	javax.json.JsonObject	An optional JSON representation of the subject

The format of the subject object will vary depending on the scope and group of notification. Not all fields in the subject will be present at all times. Some fields are optional since the underlying fields in the datamodel are optional. The section below will describe the portfolio notifications in JSON format.

NEW_VULNERABILITY

This type of notification will always contain:

1 component
1 vulnerability
1 or more affected projects

{
  "notification": {
    "level": "INFORMATIONAL",
    "scope": "PORTFOLIO",
    "group": "NEW_VULNERABILITY",
    "timestamp": "2018-08-27T23:26:22.961",
    "title": "New Vulnerability Identified",
    "content": "Apache Axis 1.4 and earlier, as used in PayPal Payments Pro, PayPal Mass Pay, PayPal Transactional Information SOAP, the Java Message Service implementation in Apache ActiveMQ, and other products, does not verify that the server hostname matches a domain name in the subject's Common Name (CN) or subjectAltName field of the X.509 certificate, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via an arbitrary valid certificate.",
    "subject": {
      "component": {
        "uuid": "4d5cd8df-cff7-4212-a038-91ae4ab79396",
        "group": "apache",
        "name": "axis",
        "version": "1.4",
        "md5": "03dcfdd88502505cc5a805a128bfdd8d",
        "sha1": "94a9ce681a42d0352b3ad22659f67835e560d107",
        "sha256": "05aebb421d0615875b4bf03497e041fe861bf0556c3045d8dda47e29241ffdd3",
        "purl": "pkg:maven/apache/[email protected]"
      },
      "vulnerability": {
        "uuid": "941a93f5-e06b-4304-84de-4d788eeb4969",
        "vulnId": "CVE-2012-5784",
        "source": "NVD",
        "aliases": [
          {
            "vulnId": "GHSA-55w9-c3g2-4rrh",
            "source": "GITHUB"
          }
        ],
        "description": "Apache Axis 1.4 and earlier, as used in PayPal Payments Pro, PayPal Mass Pay, PayPal Transactional Information SOAP, the Java Message Service implementation in Apache ActiveMQ, and other products, does not verify that the server hostname matches a domain name in the subject's Common Name (CN) or subjectAltName field of the X.509 certificate, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via an arbitrary valid certificate.",
        "cvssv2": 5.8,
        "severity": "MEDIUM",
        "cwe": {
          "cweId": 20,
          "name": "Improper Input Validation"
        },
        "cwes": [
          {
            "cweId": 20,
            "name": "Improper Input Validation"
          }
        ]
      },
      "affectedProjects": [
        {
          "uuid": "6fb1820f-5280-4577-ac51-40124aabe307",
          "name": "Acme Example",
          "version": "1.0.0"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

The cwe field is deprecated and will be removed in a later version. Please use cwes instead.

NEW_VULNERABLE_DEPENDENCY

This type of notification will always contain:

1 project
1 component
1 or more vulnerabilities

{
  "notification": {
    "level": "INFORMATIONAL",
    "scope": "PORTFOLIO",
    "group": "NEW_VULNERABLE_DEPENDENCY",
    "timestamp": "2018-08-27T23:23:00.145",
    "title": "Vulnerable Dependency Introduced",
    "content": "A dependency was introduced that contains 1 known vulnerability",
    "subject": {
      "project": {
        "uuid": "6fb1820f-5280-4577-ac51-40124aabe307",
        "name": "Acme Example",
        "version": "1.0.0"
      },
      "component": {
        "uuid": "4d5cd8df-cff7-4212-a038-91ae4ab79396",
        "group": "apache",
        "name": "axis",
        "version": "1.4",
        "md5": "03dcfdd88502505cc5a805a128bfdd8d",
        "sha1": "94a9ce681a42d0352b3ad22659f67835e560d107",
        "sha256": "05aebb421d0615875b4bf03497e041fe861bf0556c3045d8dda47e29241ffdd3",
        "purl": "pkg:maven/apache/[email protected]"
      },
      "vulnerabilities": [
        {
          "uuid": "941a93f5-e06b-4304-84de-4d788eeb4969",
          "vulnId": "CVE-2012-5784",
          "source": "NVD",
          "aliases": [
            {
              "vulnId": "GHSA-55w9-c3g2-4rrh",
              "source": "GITHUB"
            }
          ],
          "description": "Apache Axis 1.4 and earlier, as used in PayPal Payments Pro, PayPal Mass Pay, PayPal Transactional Information SOAP, the Java Message Service implementation in Apache ActiveMQ, and other products, does not verify that the server hostname matches a domain name in the subject's Common Name (CN) or subjectAltName field of the X.509 certificate, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via an arbitrary valid certificate.",
          "cvssv2": 5.8,
          "severity": "MEDIUM",
          "cwe": {
            "cweId": 20,
            "name": "Improper Input Validation"
          },
          "cwes": [
            {
              "cweId": 20,
              "name": "Improper Input Validation"
            }
          ]
        },
        {
          "uuid": "ca318ca7-616f-4af0-9c6b-15b8e208c586",
          "vulnId": "CVE-2014-3596",
          "source": "NVD",
          "aliases": [],
          "description": "The getCN function in Apache Axis 1.4 and earlier does not properly verify that the server hostname matches a domain name in the subject's Common Name (CN) or subjectAltName field of the X.509 certificate, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via a certificate with a subject that specifies a common name in a field that is not the CN field.  NOTE: this issue exists because of an incomplete fix for CVE-2012-5784.\n\n<a href=\"http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/297.html\" target=\"_blank\">CWE-297: Improper Validation of Certificate with Host Mismatch</a>",
          "cvssv2": 5.8,
          "severity": "MEDIUM"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

The cwe field is deprecated and will be removed in a later version. Please use cwes instead.

PROJECT_AUDIT_CHANGE and GLOBAL_AUDIT_CHANGE

This type of notification will always contain:

1 component
1 vulnerability
1 analysis
1 or more affected projects

In the case of PROJECT_AUDIT_CHANGE, the list of affected projects will always be equal to 1, whereas GLOBAL_AUDIT_CHANGE notifications will list all projects that are currently affected.

Audit change notifications are fired whenever the analysis state changes or when the finding is suppressed or unsuppressed.

{
  "notification": {
    "level": "INFORMATIONAL",
    "scope": "PORTFOLIO",
    "group": "PROJECT_AUDIT_CHANGE",
    "timestamp": "2018-08-28T23:53:54.414",
    "title": "Analysis Decision: Exploitable",
    "content": "An analysis decision was made to a finding affecting a project",
    "subject": {
      "component": {
        "uuid": "4d0da61c-b462-4895-b296-da0b4bb34744",
        "group": "apache",
        "name": "axis",
        "version": "1.4"
      },
      "vulnerability": {
        "uuid": "941a93f5-e06b-4304-84de-4d788eeb4969",
        "vulnId": "CVE-2012-5784",
        "source": "NVD",
        "aliases": [
          {
            "vulnId": "GHSA-55w9-c3g2-4rrh",
            "source": "GITHUB"
          }
        ],
        "description": "Apache Axis 1.4 and earlier, as used in PayPal Payments Pro, PayPal Mass Pay, PayPal Transactional Information SOAP, the Java Message Service implementation in Apache ActiveMQ, and other products, does not verify that the server hostname matches a domain name in the subject's Common Name (CN) or subjectAltName field of the X.509 certificate, which allows man-in-the-middle attackers to spoof SSL servers via an arbitrary valid certificate.",
        "cvssv2": 5.8,
        "severity": "MEDIUM"
      },
      "analysis": {
        "suppressed": false,
        "state": "EXPLOITABLE",
        "project": "6fb1820f-5280-4577-ac51-40124aabe307",
        "component": "4d0da61c-b462-4895-b296-da0b4bb34744",
        "vulnerability": "941a93f5-e06b-4304-84de-4d788eeb4969"
      },
      "affectedProjects": [
        {
          "uuid": "6fb1820f-5280-4577-ac51-40124aabe307",
          "name": "Acme Example",
          "version": "1.0.0"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

BOM_CONSUMED and BOM_PROCESSED

This type of notification will always contain:

1 project
1 bom

{
  "notification": {
    "level": "INFORMATIONAL",
    "scope": "PORTFOLIO",
    "group": "BOM_CONSUMED",
    "timestamp": "2019-08-23T21:57:57.418",
    "title": "Bill-of-Materials Consumed",
    "content": "A CycloneDX BOM was consumed and will be processed",
    "subject": {
      "project": {
        "uuid": "6fb1820f-5280-4577-ac51-40124aabe307",
        "name": "Acme Example",
        "version": "1.0.0"
      },
      "bom": {
        "content": "<base64 encoded bom>",
        "format": "CycloneDX",
        "specVersion": "1.1"
      }
    }
  }
}

POLICY_VIOLATION

{
  "notification": {
    "level": "INFORMATIONAL",
    "scope": "PORTFOLIO",
    "group": "POLICY_VIOLATION",
    "timestamp": "2022-05-12T23:07:59.611303",
    "title": "Policy Violation",
    "content": "A operational policy violation occurred",
    "subject": {
      "project": {
        "uuid": "7a36e5c0-9f09-42dd-b401-360da56c2abe",
        "name": "Acme Example",
        "version": "1.0.0"
      },
      "component": {
        "uuid": "4e04c695-9acd-46fc-9bf6-ed23d7eb551e",
        "group": "apache",
        "name": "axis",
        "version": "1.4"
      },
      "policyViolation": {
        "uuid": "c82fcb50-029a-4636-a657-96242b20680e",
        "type": "OPERATIONAL",
        "timestamp": "2022-05-12T20:34:46Z",
        "policyCondition": {
          "uuid": "8e5c0a5b-71fb-45c5-afac-6c6a99742cbe",
          "subject": "COORDINATES",
          "operator": "MATCHES",
          "value": "{\"group\":\"apache\",\"name\":\"axis\",\"version\":\"*\"}",
          "policy": {
            "uuid": "6d4c7398-689a-4ec7-b5c5-9abb6b5393e9",
            "name": "Banned Components",
            "violationState": "FAIL"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

USER_CREATED

{
  "notification": {
    "level": "INFORMATIONAL",
    "scope": "SYSTEM",
    "group": "USER_CREATED",
    "timestamp": "2022-05-12T23:07:59.611303",
    "title": "User Created",
    "content": "LDAP user created",
    "subject": {
      "id": "user",
      "username": "user",
      "name": "User 1",
      "email": "[email protected]",
      }
  }
}

USER_DELETED

{
  "notification": {
    "level": "INFORMATIONAL",
    "scope": "SYSTEM",
    "group": "USER_CREATED",
    "timestamp": "2022-05-12T23:07:59.611303",
    "title": "User Deleted",
    "content": "LDAP user deleted",
    "subject": {
      "username": "user",
    }
  }
}

Override of default templates #

Default publishers are installed in the database at startup using templates retrieved in Dependency-Track classpath. Those publishers are read-only by default. Dependency-Track can be configured from the administrative page to allow an override of the default templates. This requires SYSTEM_CONFIGURATION permission. The default publishers will still be read-only except for their templates. You will not be able to delete or add new default publishers.

notification publisher general configuration

Switch on enable default template override flag and provide a filesystem base directory to search for custom templates.

notification publisher general configuration

The default template override flag is switched off by default and can set at initial startup with environment variable DEFAULT_TEMPLATES_OVERRIDE_ENABLED. The default templates base directory is set to ${user.home} by default and can be set at initial startup with environment variable DEFAULT_TEMPLATES_OVERRIDE_BASE_DIRECTORY.

To override all default templates, you must have the following Pebble Templates template files inside the configured base directory.

<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/slack.peb
<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/msteams.peb
<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/mattermost.peb
<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/email.peb
<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/console.peb
<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/webhook.peb
<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/cswebex.peb
<base directory>/templates/notification/publisher/jira.peb

A restart is needed for the modification to be taken into account.

When deploying Dependency Track in a container environment, you must mount a volume or a configmap to supply custom Pebbles template. Please refer to deploy-docker for details.

You must set appropriate rights to the provided Pebble templates base directory in order to prevent untrusted third party to supply a fraudulent template which can lead to a code execution vulnerability.

You can, at any time, restore the default templates bundled with Dependency-Track as shown below. Please note that restoring the default templates will automatically set the templates override flag to false.

notification publisher general configuration

Creation of publisher #

Creating publishers can be performed from the administrative page which requires SYSTEM_CONFIGURATION permission.

create notification publisher

Once the publisher is created, you can modify, clone or delete it.

modify notification publisher

Deleting a publisher will delete all related notifications.

Configuring Notifications #

Creating notifications can be performed from the administrative page which requires the SYSTEM_CONFIGURATION permission. Notifications are configured in two easy steps. First create a new alert by specifying the name, scope, notification level, and publisher to use.

create notification

Once the alert is created it can be configured. Start with selecting from the list of available notification groups to notify on. Then specify the destination:

For the Email publisher: it’s a comma separated list of email addresses
For Slack, Mattermost and Microsoft Teams: it’s the incoming webhook URL generated from each respective
For Jira: it’s the project key where the issue will be created. The Jira alert also asks for the Jira ticket type (‘Task’, ‘Story’, etc., refer to the Jira documentation for more details) to be created
For the Outbound Webhook publisher: it’s a URL to which to publish the notification

configure notification

By default, portfolio notifications are published regardless of which project is affected. This behavior can be altered by optionally limiting the projects. Expand the ‘Limit To’ button to reveal and configure the list of projects.

Since v4.12, it is also possible to limit notifications to projects with a specific tag. Multiple tags can be configured. Projects must have at least one of the configured tags in order for the notification to be sent.

If both Limit to Projects and Limit to Tags are configured, projects must match any of the two conditions. They are disjunctive.

When making use of parent-child relationships of projects, it can be desirable to configure notifications only for a parent project, and have its children inherit the notification configuration. This can be achieved by enabling the Include active children of projects option in the Limit To section. Both Limit to projects and Limit to tags are inherited.

Outbound Webhooks #

With outbound webhooks, notifications and all of their relevant details can be delivered via HTTP to an endpoint configured through Dependency-Track’s notification settings.

Notifications are sent via HTTP(S) POST and contain a JSON payload. The payload has the format described above in the templating section.

Debugging missing notifications #

Missing notifications may be caused by a variety of issues:

Network outage between Dependency-Track and notification destination
Faulty proxy configuration, causing Dependency-Track to be unable to reach the notification destination
Misconfiguration of notification rules in Dependency-Track, causing the notification to not be sent
Bug in Dependency-Track’s notification routing mechanism, causing the notification to not be sent
Syntactically invalid notification content, causing the destination system to fail upon parsing it

Generally, when Dependency-Track fails to deliver a notification to the destination, it will emit log messages with level WARN or ERROR about it.

As of Dependency-Track v4.10, notification rules can additionally be configured to emit a log message with level INFO when publishing succeeded. Other than for debugging missing notifications, enabling this may also be useful in cases where notification volume needs to be audited or monitored. Note that this can cause a significant increase in log output, depending on how busy the system is.

Logs include high-level details about the notification itself, its subjects, as well as the matched rule. For example:

INFO [WebhookPublisher] Destination acknowledged reception of notification with status code 200 (PublishContext{notificationGroup=NEW_VULNERABILITY, notificationLevel=INFORMATIONAL, notificationScope=PORTFOLIO, notificationTimestamp=2023-11-20T19:14:43.427901Z, notificationSubjects={component=Component[uuid=9f608f76-382c-4e05-b05f-7f69f2f6f507, group=org.apache.commons, name=commons-compress, version=1.23.0], projects=[Project[uuid=79de8ff7-6929-4fa4-8bff-ddec2424cbd2, name=Acme App, version=1.2.3]], vulnerability=Vulnerability[id=GHSA-cgwf-w82q-5jrr, source=GITHUB]}, ruleName=Foo, ruleScope=PORTFOLIO, ruleLevel=INFORMATIONAL})

For Webhook-based notifications (Outbound Webhook, Slack, MS Teams, Mattermost, Cisco WebEx, JIRA), services like Request Bin can be used to manually verify that notifications are sent:

Create a (private) Request Bin at https://pipedream.com/requestbin
Copy the generated endpoint URL to the Destination field of the notification rule
Ensure the desired Groups are selected for the notification rule
Perform an action that triggers any of the selected groups
- e.g. for group BOM_PROCESSED, upload a BOM
Observe the Request Bin output for any incoming requests

If requests make it to the Bin, the problem is not in Dependency-Track.

Integrations

Notifications

Scopes #

Levels #

Groups #

Configuring Publishers #

Templating #

NEW_VULNERABILITY

NEW_VULNERABLE_DEPENDENCY

PROJECT_AUDIT_CHANGE and GLOBAL_AUDIT_CHANGE

BOM_CONSUMED and BOM_PROCESSED

POLICY_VIOLATION

USER_CREATED

USER_DELETED

Override of default templates #

Creation of publisher #

Configuring Notifications #

Outbound Webhooks #

Debugging missing notifications #