This section will guide you through the functions of the Kiuwan Insights module. 

Contents

Kiuwan Insights Dashboard: 

Introduction to Kiuwan Insights

Today’s time-to-market imposes high pressure on releasing new versions of your application. Productivity becomes essential. And most of the time, you will incorporate external open source components that let you build new functionality very fast and with minimum effort.

Open Source repositories provide huge amounts of software that lets you build new applications very fast and robustly.

But not all are benefits; there might be also some drawbacks when using open source components.


  • Do you have a complete inventory of the 3rd party components being used by your software?

    If you are a developer you most probably know the answer to this question. But if you are in a position closer to management, likely, you don’t know the answer. Modern applications, in most cases, are using open source components and yours will not be an exception. And, although the benefits are clear, you might be thinking of some inherent risks.

 

  • Do you know the degree of security breaches introduced by those 3rd party components?
    You most probably are dedicating a lot of effort to remediate security vulnerabilities in your software, but those efforts are useless if 3rd components are vulnerable.  As you know, any security vulnerability makes the whole application vulnerable.

 

  • Do you know if those components are obsolete?
    You might be using “outdated” components or, even worse, “dead” components. Old versions might be introducing security breaches or bugs that are solved in newer versions. Or even worse, what would happen if those buggy components are dead, i.e. are not being updated?

 

  • Are you aware of legal licensing implications of using those 3rd party components?

    Many 3rd party components are Copyleft licensed. In a broad sense, these kind of licenses mean that, although you are allowed to use that software in your application, once you have included them in your application, the whole application becomes Copyleft licensed, i.e. you are implicitly giving every person who receives a copy of your software permissions to reproduce, adapt, or distribute it. Is this your intention? If not, you should identify all the Copyleft components you are using in your application and act accordingly.

 

Kiuwan Insights comes to answer all these questions by providing:

  1. a complete components inventory of 3rd party software used by your applications, and
  2. detailed information on security, obsolescence and licensing Risks of those components


Components Inventory

Kiuwan Insight analyzes your application software, discovering all external dependencies, and builds a components inventory that lets you track any external piece of code that could be part of your application.

Go to Insights > Components to access the components inventory. 

Supported languages and resources

Kiuwan Insights uses the following resources to extract information on 3rd party dependencies.

Supported languagesSupported repositoriesSupported build systemsRepositories UsedDatabase Vulnerabilities UsedLicenses extract from
Java
  • Maven
  • Gradle
  • Ant (*.xml files)
  • Maven (pom.xml files)
  • Gradle (*.gradle files)
  • *.jar, *.war, *.ear files

Maven (central or others configured in settings.xml or pom.xml files):

https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/

  • pom.xml
  • License file into jar file.
Javascript
  • Npm
  • Bower
  • Npm (package.json files)
  • Bower (bower.json files)
  • Yarn (package.json files)
Npm: https://www.npmjs.com/
  • NPM Rest services.
.Net
  • Nuget
  • Nuget (*.csproj, project.json, global.json, *.vbproj files)
Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/
  • Nuget Rest services.
Python
  • PyPI
  • GitHub
  • PyPI (setup.py files)
  • Requirements (txt file with declared dependencies)
PyPI: https://pypi.org/
  • PyPI Rest services
Scala
  • Maven

  • SBT (build.sbt)

Maven (central or others configured in settings.xml or pom.xml files):

https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/

  • pom.xml.
Swift
  • Cocoapods
  • GitHub
  • Podspec (*.podspec, Podfile.lock files)
  • Package (Package.swift files)

Repository Podspec in Github:

https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs

  • podspec.json of the component.
Php
  • Packagist
  • Composer (composer.json, composer.lock files)
Packagist: https://packagist.org/
  • Packagist Rest services.
Ruby
  • RubyGems
  • Gemfile, Gemfile.lock and *.gemspec files
RubyGems: https://rubygems.org/
  • License and obsolescence pending
Kotlin
  • Maven
  • Gradle
  • Ant
  • Ant (*.xml files)
  • Maven (pom.xml files)
  • Gradle (*.gradle and *.gradle.kts files)

Maven (central or others configured in settings.xml or pom.xml files):

https://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/

  • Maven services

Database vulnerabilities

NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/

From these sources, Kiuwan Insight builds the Components Inventory of your application.

You can add your specific private (local or remote) and/or public repositories by properly configuring Kiuwan Local Analyzer.

Please visit Insights - Additional Maven repositories for further information.

Security, Obsolescence, and Licensing

At a glance, Kiuwan Insights provides detailed information and visual indicators that quickly let you know the different levels of risk associated with every external component.

Every component is assigned a level (High, Medium, Low or None) on three different risk metrics:

 

Security information is available at Insights > Security.

 

Obsolescence information is available at Insights > Obsolescence .

 

Licensing information is available at Insights > Licenses.