Vulnerability severity levels

GitLab vulnerability analyzers attempt to return vulnerability severity level values whenever possible. The following is a list of available GitLab vulnerability severity levels, ranked from most to least severe:

  • Critical
  • High
  • Medium
  • Low
  • Info
  • Unknown

Most GitLab vulnerability analyzers are wrappers around popular open source scanning tools. Each open source scanning tool provides their own native vulnerability severity level value. These values can be one of the following:

Native vulnerability severity level type Examples
String WARNING, ERROR, Critical, Negligible
Integer 1, 2, 5
CVSS v2.0 Rating (AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:N)
CVSS v3.1 Qualitative Severity Rating CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

To provide consistent vulnerability severity level values, the GitLab vulnerability analyzers convert from the above values to a standardized GitLab vulnerability severity level, as outlined in the following tables:

SAST

GitLab analyzer Outputs severity levels? Native severity level type Native severity level example
security-code-scan Yes String CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM in analyzer version 3.2.0 and later. In earlier versions, hardcoded to Unknown.
brakeman Yes String HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW
sobelow Yes Not applicable Hardcodes all severity levels to Unknown
nodejs-scan Yes String INFO, WARNING, ERROR
flawfinder Yes Integer 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
SpotBugs Yes Integer 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 18
phpcs-security-audit Yes String ERROR, WARNING
pmd-apex Yes Integer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
kubesec Yes String CriticalSeverity, InfoSeverity
secrets Yes Not applicable Hardcodes all severity levels to Critical
semgrep Yes String error, warning, note, none
kics Yes String error, warning, note, none (gets mapped to info in analyzer version 3.7.0 and later)

Dependency Scanning

GitLab analyzer Outputs severity levels? Native severity level type Native severity level example
gemnasium Yes CVSS v2.0 Rating and CVSS v3.1 Qualitative Severity Rating 1 (AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:N), CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

The CVSS v3.1 rating is used to calculate the severity level. If it’s not available, the CVSS v2.0 rating is used instead.

Container Scanning

GitLab analyzer Outputs severity levels? Native severity level type Native severity level example
container-scanning Yes String Unknown, Low, Medium, High, Critical

When available, the vendor severity level takes precedence and is used by the analyzer. If that is not available then it falls back on the CVSS v3.1 rating. If that is also not available, then the CVSS v2.0 rating is used instead. Details on this implementation are available on the respective issues for trivy and grype.

Fuzz Testing

All fuzz testing results are reported as Unknown. They should be reviewed and triaged manually to find exploitable faults to prioritize for fixing.