Currently, we grab the per-year CVE feeds, in two passes: first, we grab
the meta files, and check whether something has changed since last we
downloaded it; second, we download the feed proper, unless the meta file
has not changed, in which case we use the locally cached feed.
However, it has appeared that the FKIE releases no longer provide the
meta files, which means that (once again), our daily reports are broken.
The obvious fix would be to drop the use of the meta file, and always
and unconditionally download the feeds. That's relatively trivial to do,
but the feeds are relatively big (even as xz-xompressed).
However, the CVE database from FKIE is available as a git tree. Git is
pretty good at only sending delta when updating a local copy. In
addition, the git tree, contains each CVE as an individual file, so it
is relatively easier to scan and parse.
Switch to using a local git clone.
Slightly surprisingly (but not so much either), parsing the CVE files is
much faster when using the git working copy, than it is when parsing the
per-year feeds: indeed, the per-year feeds are xz-compressed, and even
if python is slow-ish to scan a directory and opening files therein, it
is still much faster than to decompress xz files. The timing delta [0]
is ~100s before and ~10s now, about a ten time improvement, over the
whole package set.
The drawback, however, is that the git tree is much bigger on-disk, from
~55MiB for the per-year compressed feeds, to 2.1GiB for the git tree
(~366MiB) and a working copy (~1.8GiB)... Given very few people are
going to use that, that's considered acceptable...
Eventually, with a bit of hacking [1], the two pkg-stats, before and
after this change, yield the same data (except for the date and commit
hash).
[0] hacking support/scripts/pkg-stats to display the time before/after
the CVE scan, and hacking support/scripts/cve.py to do no download so
that only the CVE scan happens (and also because the meta files are no
longer available).
[1] sorting the CVE lists in json, sorting the json keys, and using the
commit from the FKIE git tree that was used for the current per-year
feeds.
Signed-off-by: Yann E. MORIN <yann.morin.1998@free.fr>
Cc: Arnout Vandecappelle (Essensium/Mind) <arnout@mind.be>
Cc: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@bootlin.com>
Signed-off-by: Arnout Vandecappelle <arnout@mind.be>
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