alt Hacker NewsPart of the problem is that customers will scan your code with these tools and they won't accept "we never call that function" as an answer (and maybe that's rational if they can't verify that that's true). This is where actual security starts to really diverge from the practices we've developed in the name of security.
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unshavedyak • yesterday at 11:06 PM
Would be neat if the call graph could be asserted easily.. As you could not only validate what vulnerabilities you are / aren't exposed to, but also choose to blacklist some API calls as a form of mitigation. Ensuring you don't accidentally start using something that's proven unsafe.
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There is the VEX justification Vulnerable_code_not_in_execute_path. But it's an application-level assertion. I don't think there's a standardized mechanism that can describe this at the component level, from which the application-level assertion could be synthesized. Standardized vulnerability metadata is per component, not per component-to-component relationship. So it's just easier to fix vulnerability.
But I don't quite understand what Dependabot is doing for Go specifically. The vulnerability goes away without source code changes if the dependency is updated from version 1.1.0 to 1.1.1. So anyone building the software (producing an application binary) could just do that, and the intermediate packages would not have to change at all. But it doesn't seem like the standard Go toolchain automates this.