capslock

Capslock is a capability analysis CLI for Go packages that informs users of which privileged operations a given package can access. This works by classifying the capabilities of Go packages by following transitive calls to privileged standard library operations.

The recent increase in supply chain attacks targeting open source software has highlighted that third party dependencies should not be inherently trusted. Capabilities indicate what permissions a package has access to, and can be used in conjunction with other security signals to indicate which code requires additional scrutiny before it can be considered trusted.

What are capabilities?

Current security analysis focuses a lot on identifying vulnerabilities in packages -- an important goal given the rate of new CVEs being identified. To complement this analysis, we are alerting on the capabilities of packages, meaning that we are identifying what permissions the package has access to via its transitive dependencies on standard library functions with privileged accesses.

This has many potential applications, from identifying the purpose of packages by looking at what capabilities they use, to directing security reviews to more privileged code paths, and even alerting on unexpected capability changes to stop potential supply chain threats before they can become an issue.

This is motivated by the Principle of Least Privilege -- the idea that access should be limited to the minimal set that is feasible and practical. We intend to apply this to software development to ensure that code can be scoped to the minimal set of capabilities that are required to perform its intended purpose.

To learn more about the capabilities in your dependencies, install Capslock

go install github.com/google/capslock/cmd/capslock@latest

You can then invoke Capslock by running capslock from the path of the packages you want to analyze.

Caveats

See the caveats file.

Contributing

See the contributing file.

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