Vulnerability Report

The Vulnerability Report provides information about vulnerabilities from scans of the default branch. It contains cumulative results of all successful jobs, regardless of whether the pipeline was successful. The scan results from a pipeline are only ingested after all the jobs in the pipeline complete.

The report is available for users with the correct role on projects, groups, and the Security Center.

At all levels, the Vulnerability Report contains:

  • Totals of vulnerabilities per severity level.
  • Filters for common vulnerability attributes.
  • Details of each vulnerability, presented in tabular layout.

For an overview, see Vulnerability Management.

The Activity column contains icons to indicate the activity, if any, taken on the vulnerability in that row:

  • Issues : Links to issues created for the vulnerability. For more details, read Create an issue for a vulnerability.
  • Wrench : The vulnerability has been remediated.
  • False positive : The scanner determined this vulnerability to be a false positive.

To open an issue created for a vulnerability, hover over the Activity entry, then select the link. The issue icon () indicates the issue’s status. If Jira issue support is enabled, the issue link found in the Activity entry links out to the issue in Jira. Unlike GitLab issues, the status of a Jira issue is not shown in the GitLab UI.

Example project-level Vulnerability Report

Project-level Vulnerability Report

At the project level, the Vulnerability Report also contains:

  • A time stamp showing when it was updated, including a link to the latest pipeline.
  • The number of failures that occurred in the most recent pipeline. Select the failure notification to view the Failed jobs tab of the pipeline’s page.

When vulnerabilities originate from a multi-project pipeline setup, this page displays the vulnerabilities that originate from the selected project.

View the project-level vulnerability report

To view the project-level vulnerability report:

  1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
  2. Select Secure > Vulnerability report.

Vulnerability Report actions

From the Vulnerability Report you can:

Vulnerability Report filters

You can filter the Vulnerability Report to narrow focus on only vulnerabilities matching specific criteria.

The available filters are:

The filters’ criteria are combined to show only vulnerabilities matching all criteria. An exception to this behavior is the Activity filter. For more details about how it works, see Activity filter.

Filter the list of vulnerabilities

To filter the list of vulnerabilities:

  1. Select a filter.
  2. Select values from the dropdown list.
  3. Repeat the above steps for each desired filter.

After each filter is selected:

  • The list of matching vulnerabilities is updated.
  • The vulnerability severity totals are updated.

Tool filter

The third-party tool filter was introduced in GitLab 13.12.

The tool filter allows you to focus on vulnerabilities detected by selected tools.

When using the tool filter, you can choose:

  • All tools (default).
  • Individual GitLab-provided tools.
  • Any integrated third-party tool.

For details of each of the available tools, see Security scanning tools.

Project filter

The content of the Project filter depends on the current level:

Activity filter

The Activity filter behaves differently from the other filters. The selected values form mutually exclusive sets to allow for precisely locating the desired vulnerability records. Additionally, not all options can be selected in combination.

Selection behavior when using the Activity filter:

  • All: Vulnerabilities with any Activity status (same as ignoring this filter). Selecting this deselects any other Activity filter options.
  • No activity: Only vulnerabilities without either an associated issue or that are no longer detected. Selecting this deselects any other Activity filter options.
  • With issues: Only vulnerabilities with one or more associated issues. Does not include vulnerabilities that also are no longer detected.
  • No longer detected: Only vulnerabilities that are no longer detected in the latest pipeline scan of the default branch. Does not include vulnerabilities with one or more associated issues.
  • With issues and No longer detected: Only vulnerabilities that have one or more associated issues and also are no longer detected in the latest pipeline scan of the default branch.

View details of a vulnerability

To view more details of a vulnerability, select the vulnerability’s Description. The vulnerability’s details page is opened.

View vulnerable source location

Some security scanners output the filename and line number of a potential vulnerability. When that information is available, the vulnerability’s details include a link to the relevant file, in the default branch.

To view the relevant file, select the filename in the vulnerability’s details.

Change status of vulnerabilities

Providing a comment and dismissal reason introduced in GitLab 16.0.

From the Vulnerability Report you can change the status of one or more vulnerabilities.

To change the status of vulnerabilities in the table:

  1. Select the checkbox beside each vulnerability you want to update the status of. To select all, select the checkbox in the table header.
  2. In the Set status dropdown list, select the desired status.
  3. If the Dismissed status is chosen, select the desired reason in the Set dismissal reason dropdown list.
  4. In the Add a comment input, you can provide a comment. For the Dismissed status, a comment is required.
  5. Select Change status.

Project Vulnerability Report

Sort vulnerabilities by date detected

By default, vulnerabilities are sorted by severity level, with the highest-severity vulnerabilities listed at the top.

To sort vulnerabilities by the date each vulnerability was detected, select the “Detected” column header.

Export vulnerability details

You can export details of the vulnerabilities listed in the Vulnerability Report. The export format is CSV (comma separated values). All vulnerabilities are included because filters do not apply to the export.

Fields included are:

  • Group name
  • Project name
  • Scanner type
  • Scanner name
  • Status
  • Vulnerability
  • Basic details
  • Additional information
  • Severity
  • CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)
  • CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration)
  • Other identifiers
  • Detected At
  • Location
  • Activity: Returns true if the vulnerability is resolved on the default branch, and false if not.
  • Comments
note
Full details are available through our Job Artifacts API. Use one of the gl-*-report.json report filenames in place of *artifact_path to obtain, for example, the path of files in which vulnerabilities were detected.

Export details in CSV format

To export details of all vulnerabilities listed in the Vulnerability Report, select Export.

The details are retrieved from the database, then the CSV file is downloaded to your local computer.

note
It may take several minutes for the download to start if your project contains thousands of vulnerabilities. Do not close the page until the download finishes.

Dismiss a vulnerability

When you evaluate a vulnerability and decide it requires no more action, you can mark it as Dismissed. Dismissed vulnerabilities do not appear in the merge request security widget when detected in future scans.

When a vulnerability is dismissed in a project or group, a record is made of:

  • Who dismissed it.
  • Date and time when it was dismissed.
  • Optionally, a reason why it was dismissed.

Vulnerability records cannot be deleted, so a permanent record always remains.

You can dismiss a vulnerability in projects and groups:

  1. Select the vulnerability in the Security Dashboard.
  2. In the upper-right corner, from the Status dropdown list, select Dismissed.
  3. Optional. Add a reason for the dismissal and select Save comment.

To undo this action, select a different status from the same menu.

Manually add a vulnerability finding

Version history

To add a new vulnerability finding from your project level Vulnerability Report page:

  1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
  2. Select Secure > Vulnerability report.
  3. Select Submit vulnerability.
  4. Complete the fields and submit the form.

You are brought to the newly created vulnerability’s detail page. Manually created records appear in the Group, Project, and Security Center Vulnerability Reports. To filter them, use the Generic Tool filter.

Operational vulnerabilities

Introduced in GitLab 14.6.

The Operational vulnerabilities tab lists vulnerabilities found by Operational container scanning. This tab appears on the project, group, and Security Center vulnerability reports.

Operational Vulnerability Tab