Overview
Policies define security and license compliance behavior specifications. Policies enable you to create a set of rules, in which each rule defines a license/security criteria, with a corresponding set of automatic actions according to your needs. Policies are enforced when applying them to Watches. A policy is contextless, which means that it only defines what to enforce and not what to enforce it on.
Separating the behavior you want to enforce from the context you want to enforce it on provides you with the following values:
Efficiency. Reduce work and save time by configuring your policies once and assigning them to multiple watches.
Flexibility. Configure multiple behaviours with additional functionality such as priority of your security rules.
Separate Concerns. Delegate permissions to different teams in your organization. Everything related to resources and filters is in the watch, and everything related to security and license compliance is in policies.
Note
Starting from Xray 3.21.2, the Watches configuration has been moved from the Application Module to the Administration Module in the JFrog Platform UI.
Triggering Violations Using Policy Rules
Policies contain user-defined rules allowing you to trigger violations for specific vulnerability or license breaches by setting a license or security criteria, with a corresponding set of automatic actions according to your needs. Rules are processed according to the ascending order in which they are placed in the Rules list on the Policy. If a rule is met, the subsequent rules in the list will not be applied.
Xray supports the following policy types:
Security Rules
A Security Rule allows you to create a set of rules around security vulnerabilities. There are two possible criteria:
Minimal Severity (Minor, Major, Critical, All): The minimal security vulnerability severity as it is in the JFrog vulnerabilities database. If the artifact or build contains a vulnerability with the selected severity or higher, the rule will meet the criteria, the automatic actions will be executed, and the policy will stop processing.
CVSS Score (1-10): The CVSS score range to apply to the rule. This is used for a fine-grained control, rather than using the predefined severities. The score range is based on CVSS v3 scoring, and CVSS v2 score is CVSS v3 score is not available.
Vulnerabilities IDs: Creates policy rules for specific vulnerability IDs that you input. You can add multiple vulnerabilities IDs up to 100, separated by ",". CVEs and Xray IDs are supported.
Generate violations only when fixed versions are available: Xray will not generate violations for issues that do not contain a fixed version. If a fixed version is available later, the violation will be generated.
License Rules
A license Rule allows you to create a set of rules around license compliance. There are three possible criteria:
Allowed Licenses: Specifies an Allow List of OSS licenses that may be attached to a component. If a component has an OSS license outside the specified Allow List, The rule will meet the criteria, a violation will be generated, automatic actions will be executed, and the policy will stop processing.
Banned Licenses: Specifies a Block List of OSS licenses that may not be attached to a component. If a component has any of the OSS licenses specified, The rule will meet the criteria, a violation will be generated, automatic actions will be executed, and the policy will stop processing.
Disallow Unknown License: Specifies the wanted behavior for components whose license cannot be determined. A violation will be triggered if a component with unknown license is found.
Policy Violation Automatic Actions
An action determines the automatic response to a detected Policy violation. You can define one or more action within each Policy Rule. Actions include the following:
Generate Violation (Minor, Major, Critical): The severity of the violations that is generated if the criteria is met.
Notify Email: This action lets you specify email addresses to which Xray should send an email message about a violation when one is triggered. For this to work, you need to have a mail server configured in Xray.
Notify Watch's Recipients: This action lets you send an email to all the watch recipients about a violation when triggered.
Notify Deployer: This action lets you send an email to the user that deployed the component about a violation when triggered.
Create Jira Ticket: This action enables the Jira ticket creation in the Policy rules
Trigger Webhook: This action lets you specify webhooks you have configured in Xray that should be invoked when a violation is triggered (See payload below).
Block Download: This action lets you specify that artifacts should be blocked for download and allows you to select one of these options:
Block Download: When set, Artifactory will block download of artifacts that meet the Artifact Filter and Severity Filter specifications for this watch.
Block Unscanned: When set, Artifactory will block download of artifacts that meet the Artifact Filter specifications for this watch, but have not been scanned yet or the Xray data has been removed due to a retention policy. For more information on Xray Data Retention, see Indexing Xray Resources.
Block Release Bundle distribution: This action lets you specify that Release Bundles should be blocked for download if they meet the policy criteria rule.
Fail Build: This action lets you specify that if a CI server requests a build to be scanned, and the Watch triggers a violation, Xray will respond with an indication that the build job should fail.
This action is only available if the Watch is defined with Builds as target type.
Grace Period: There are many cases where you do not want to fail the first build, for example, some violations are not showstoppers, and you would like to look into them later without stopping the build creation. You can set a grace period for a number of days that you define according to your needs. During the grace period you define, the build will not fail and all violations are ignored during this period. An automatic Ignore Ruleis created for the grace period with the following criteria:
On the specific vulnerability/license
On the specific component
On any version of the specific build
On the specific Policy
On the specific Watch
Once the grace period ends, the Ignore Rule is deleted, and if the build contains violations, those violations are created and the build will fail.
Creating a Policy
Step 1 Setting the General Policy Settings
In the Administration module, select Watches & Policies and from the Policies tab click New Policy.
Select the policy rule type and configure the rule.
Security: Lets you create a set of rules around security vulnerabilities. Choose how you want Xray to respond to each vulnerability severity.
License: Lets you create a set of rules around allowed/banned sets of licenses.
Operational Risk: Lets you create a set of rules about the operational risk of using open source software components. For more information, see Components Operational Risk.
Set the priority in which rules are processed. Drag and drop the rules to place them according to their priority.
Set the Rule Criteria.
If the criteria is met, then the automatic actions of this rule are executed and the policy is considered as processed (no further rules will be checked).
Set automatic actions to run if a criteria is met.
Step 2 Creating a Policy Rule
Configure the the basic policy settings and select your policy type - Security or License.
Configure a Security Rule
Select Security from the drop-down list and click New Rule to set criteria and assign automatic actions.