README

Read, write and canonicalize OpenVEX documents in PHP.

VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) answers the question a scanner can't: a CVE appears in your SBOM, but does it actually affect the shipped artifact? An OpenVEX document records that judgement — not_affected, affected, fixed or under_investigation, with a machine-readable reason — so a consumer can suppress the noise with an audit trail.

It gives you:

Model — immutable value objects for the whole spec (documents, statements, vulnerabilities, products and subcomponents) that enforce the status/justification rules on construction, so an invalid statement can't exist.
(De)serialization — fromJson() / toJson() round-trips real-world documents.
Canonical hash & IRI — the deterministic document @id, byte-for-byte compatible with the reference implementation (openvex/go-vex).

Install

composer require k2gl/openvex

Requires PHP 8.1+ and ext-json (bundled with PHP). No other dependencies.

Usage

Author a document

use K2gl\OpenVex\OpenVex;
use K2gl\OpenVex\Status;
use K2gl\OpenVex\Justification;

$json = OpenVex::create(author: 'Acme, Inc.')
    ->statement(
        vulnerability: 'CVE-2024-1234',
        status: Status::NotAffected,
        products: ['pkg:composer/k2gl/dsse@1.3.0'],
        justification: Justification::VulnerableCodeNotInExecutePath,
    )
    ->toJson();

A product is any IRI or package URL; pass a string for the common case, or a full Product (with subcomponents, hashes and other identifiers) when you need it. build() returns the Document instead of JSON and stamps its canonical @id.

Read and query a document

use K2gl\OpenVex\Document;
use K2gl\OpenVex\Status;

$document = Document::fromJson($json);

foreach ($document->statementsFor('pkg:composer/k2gl/dsse@1.3.0') as $statement) {
    if ($statement->status === Status::NotAffected) {
        // suppress this CVE for that product, with $statement->justification as the reason
    }
}

statementsFor() matches an IRI, purl, CPE or hash digest against each statement's products and their subcomponents.

Canonical identity

Two documents with the same impact statements always get the same @id, regardless of metadata. That makes documents content-addressable and easy to deduplicate.

$document->canonicalHash(); // "8ed99017…" — sha256 over the statements only
$document->generateId();    // "https://openvex.dev/docs/public/vex-8ed99017…"

Design

The status rules of the spec (not_affected needs a justification or an impact statement, affected needs an action statement, and so on) are checked in the Statement constructor — parsing an invalid document throws rather than yielding a half-valid object.
Canonicalization follows go-vex exactly and is verified against its published test vectors. Where go-vex leaves component hash/identifier ordering to Go's random map iteration, this port sorts the keys, which is identical for the single-entry maps that occur in practice and deterministic otherwise.
Timestamps finer than microseconds (Go emits nanoseconds) are truncated on parse; the canonical hash only uses whole seconds, so a document's identity is unaffected.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

k2gl / openvex

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