cve-search is a tool to import CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) and CPE (Common Platform Enumeration) into a MongoDB to facilitate search and processing of CVEs.

The main objective of the software is to avoid doing direct and public lookups into the public CVE databases. Local lookups are usually faster and you can limit your sensitive queries via the Internet.

cve-search includes a back-end to store vulnerabilities and related information, an intuitive web interface for search and managing vulnerabilities, a series of tools to query the system and a web API interface.

cve-search is used by many organizations. The public CVE services of CIRCL were also powered by cve-search, but they have since been superseded by Vulnerability-Lookup.

This document gives you basic information how to start with cve-search. For more information please refer to the documentation in the /doc folder of this project.

Check the documentation to get you started

You can search the database using search.py.

usage: search.py [-h] [-q Q] [-p P [P ...]] [--only-if-vulnerable] [--strict_vendor_product] [--lax] [-f F] [-c C] [-o O]
                 [-l] [-n] [-r] [-a] [-v V] [-s S] [-t T] [-i I]

Search for vulnerabilities in the National Vulnerability DB. Data from https://nvd.nist.gov/.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p P [P ...]          P = search one or more products, e.g. o:microsoft:windows_7 or o:cisco:ios:12.1 or
                        o:microsoft:windows_7 o:cisco:ios:12.1. Add --only-if-vulnerable if only vulnerabilities that
                        directly affect the product are wanted.
  --only-if-vulnerable  With this option, "-p" will only return vulnerabilities directly assigned to the product. I.e.
                        it will not consider "windows_7" if it is only mentioned as affected OS in an adobe:reader
                        vulnerability.
  --strict_vendor_product
                        With this option, a strict vendor product search is executed. The values in "-p" should be
                        formatted as vendor:product, e.g. microsoft:windows_7
  --lax                 Strict search for software version is disabled. Likely gives false positives for earlier
                        versions that were not yet vulnerable. Note that version comparison for non-numeric values
                        is done with simplifications.
  -f F                  F = free text search in vulnerability summary
  -c C                  search one or more CVE-ID
  -o O                  O = output format [csv|html|json|xml|cveid]
  -l                    sort in descending mode
  -n                    lookup complete cpe (Common Platform Enumeration) name for vulnerable configuration
  -r                    lookup ranking of vulnerable configuration
  -a                    Lookup CAPEC for related CWE weaknesses
  -v V                  vendor name to lookup in reference URLs
  -s S                  search in summary text
  -t T                  search in last n day (published)
  -T T                  search in last n day (modified)
  -i I                  Limit output to n elements (default: unlimited)
  -q [Q]                Removed. Was used to search pip requirements file for CVEs.

Examples:

./bin/search.py -p cisco:ios:12.4
./bin/search.py -p cisco:ios:12.4 -o json
./bin/search.py -f nagios -n
./bin/search.py -p microsoft:windows_7 -o html

If you want to search all the WebEx vulnerabilities and only printing the official references from the supplier.

./bin/search.py -p webex: -o csv  -v "cisco"

You can also dump the JSON for a specific CVE ID.

./bin/search.py -c CVE-2010-3333 -o json

Or dump the last 2 CVE entries in RSS or Atom format.

./bin/dump_last.py -f atom -l 2

Or you can use the web interface or web API.

There is a ranking database allowing to rank software vulnerabilities based on their common platform enumeration name. The ranking can be done per organization or department within your organization or any meaningful name for you.

As an example, you can add a partial CPE name like "sap:netweaver" which is very critical for your accounting department.

./sbin/db_ranking.py  -c "sap:netweaver" -g "accounting" -r 3

and then you can lookup the ranking (-r option) for a specific CVE-ID:

./bin/search.py -c CVE-2012-4341  -r  -n

As cve-search is based on a set of tools, it can be used and combined with standard Unix tools. If you ever wonder what are the top vendors using the term "unknown" for their vulnerabilities:

python3 bin/search_fulltext.py -q unknown -f \
    | jq -c '. | .vulnerable_configuration[0]' \
    | cut -f5 -d: | sort  | uniq -c  | sort -nr | head -10

1500 oracle
381 sun
372 hp
232 google
208 ibm
126 mozilla
103 microsoft
100 adobe
 78 apple
 68 linux

You can compare CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System ) values of some products based on their CPE name. Like comparing oracle:java versus sun:jre and using R to make some statistics about their CVSS values:

python3 bin/search.py -p oracle:java -o json \
  | jq -r '.cvss' | Rscript -e 'summary(as.numeric(read.table(file("stdin"))[,1]))'

Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
1.800   5.350   9.300   7.832  10.000  10.000

python3 bin/search.py -p sun:jre -o json \
  | jq -r '.cvss' | Rscript -e 'summary(as.numeric(read.table(file("stdin"))[,1]))'

Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.
0.000   5.000   7.500   7.333  10.000  10.000

If you want to index all the CVEs from your current MongoDB collection:

./sbin/db_fulltext.py -l 0

and you query the fulltext index (to get a list of matching CVE-ID):

./bin/search_fulltext.py -q NFS -q Linux

or to query the fulltext index and output the JSON object for each CVE-ID:

./bin/search_fulltext.py -q NFS -q Linux -f

The fulltext indexer can be used to generate JSON data of the most common keywords in CVE entries. It uses NLTK to lemmatize words (convert to base forms) and to filter out common English stopwords.

Run the script to generate the JSON:

./bin/search_fulltext.py  -g -s > cve.json

The resulting cve.json contains a flat hierarchy:

{
  "name": "cve-search",
  "children": [
    {"name": "vulnerability", "size": 4855},
    {"name": "allow", "size": 2544},
    {"name": "file", "size": 2240},
    ...
  ]
}

The script does not create the visualizations, but the cve.json can be used as source data for visualization tools such as D3-hierarchy Pack diagrams or word cloud generators.

The web interface provides an intiutive way to browse the most recent CVE entries and look up details about a specific CVE. Comprehensive instructions for configuring and deploying the web interface as a SystemD service or an uWSGI application are available in the WebGUI documentation.

To launch the web interface quickly for testing purposes, run:

python3 ./web/index.py

Once started, open your browser and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5000/.

The web interface includes a minimal JSON API to get CVE by ID, by vendor or product.

The public API at cve.circl.lu has replaced cve-search with Vulnerability-Lookup, but the API remains mostly backwards compatible.

List the know vendors in JSON

curl "http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/browse/"

Dump the product of a specific vendor in JSON

curl "http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/browse/zyxel"
{
  "product": [
    "n300_netusb_nbg-419n",
    "n300_netusb_nbg-419n_firmware",
    "p-660h-61",
    "p-660h-63",
    "p-660h-67",
    "p-660h-d1",
    "p-660h-d3",
    "p-660h-t1",
    "p-660h-t3",
    "p-660hw",
    "p-660hw_d1",
    "p-660hw_d3",
    "p-660hw_t3"
  ],
  "vendor": "zyxel"
}

Find the associated vulnerabilities to a vendor and a product.

curl "http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/search/zyxel/p-660hw" | jq .
[
  {
    "cwe": "CWE-352",
    "references": [
      "http://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/33518",
      "http://secunia.com/advisories/58513",
      "http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/126812/Zyxel-P-660HW-T1-Cross-Site-Request-Forgery.html",
      "http://osvdb.org/show/osvdb/107449"
    ],
    "vulnerable_configuration": [
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw:_t1:v3"
    ],
    "Published": "2014-06-16T14:55:09.713-04:00",
    "id": "CVE-2014-4162",
    "Modified": "2014-07-17T01:07:29.683-04:00",
    "cvss": 6.8,
    "summary": "Multiple cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in the Zyxel P-660HW-T1 (v3) wireless router allow remote attackers to hijack the authentication of administrators for requests that change the (1) wifi password or (2) SSID via a request to Forms/WLAN_General_1."
  },
  {
    "cwe": "CWE-20",
    "references": [
      "http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/893726"
    ],
    "vulnerable_configuration": [
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-63:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-t1:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-d3:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-t3:v2",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-t1:v2",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-d1:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-67:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660h-61:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw_t3:v2",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw_t3:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw_d3:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw_d1:v2",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw_d1:-",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw:_t1:v2",
      "cpe:/h:zyxel:p-660hw:_t1:-"
    ],

• MISP modules cve-search to interact with MISP
• MISP module cve-advanced to import complete CVE as MISP objects
• cve-portal which is a CVE notification portal
• cve-search-mt which is a set of management tools for CVE-Search
• cve-scan which is a NMap CVE system scanner
• Mercator which is an application that allow the mapping of an information system

Official dockerized version of cve-search:

CVE-Search-Docker

There are some unofficial dockerized versions of cve-search (which are not maintained by us):

• docker-cve-search
• cve-search-docker

You can find the changelog on GitHub Releases (legacy changelog).

cve-search is free software released under the "GNU Affero General Public License v3.0"

Copyright (c) 2012 Wim Remes - https://github.com/wimremes/
Copyright (c) 2012-2024 Alexandre Dulaunoy - https://github.com/adulau/
Copyright (c) 2015-2019 Pieter-Jan Moreels - https://github.com/pidgeyl/
Copyright (c) 2020-2024 Paul Tikken - https://github.com/P-T-I