It-Depends

It-Depends is a tool to automatically build a dependency graph and Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for packages and arbitrary source code repositories. You can use it to enumerate all third party dependencies for a software package, map those dependencies to known security vulnerabilities, as well as compare the similarity between two packages based on their dependencies.

To the best of our knowledge, It-Depends is the only such tool with the following features:

• Support for C/C++ projects (both autootools and cmake)
• Automated resolution of native library dependencies partially based on dynamic analysis (e.g., the Python package pytz depends on the native library libtinfo.so.6)
• Enumeration of all possible dependency resolutions, not just a single feasible resolution
• A comparison metric for the similarity between two packages based on their dependency graph

Features ⭐

• Supports Go, JavaScript, Rust, Python, and C/C++ projects.
• Accepts source code repositories or package specifications like pip:it-depends
• Extracts dependencies of cmake/autotool repostories without building it
• Finds native dependencies for high level languages like Python or JavaScript
• Provides visualization based on vis.js or dot
• Matches dependencies and CVEs
• Export Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs)
  • Machine-intelligible JSON output
  • Support for the SPDX standard is in active development

Can It-Depends Do It? It Depends. 🍋

• It-Depends does not detect vendored or copy/pasted dependencies
• Results from build systems like autotools and cmake that entail arbitrary computation at install time are
  best-effort
• Resolution of native dependencies is best-effort
  • Some native dependencies are resolved through dynamic analysis
  • Native dependencies are inferred by cross-referencing file requirements against paths provided by the Ubuntu
    package repository; dependencies may be different across other Linux distributions or Ubuntu versions
• It-Depends attempts to resolve all possible package versions that satisfy a dependency
  • It-Depends does not find a single satisfying package resolution
  • The list of resolved packages is intended to be a superset of the packages required by the installation of
    a package on any system
  • The --audit feature may discover vulnerabilities in upstream dependencies that are either not exploitable in the
    target package or are in a package version that cannot exist in any valid dependency resolution of the target
    package
• It-Depends caches data that it expects to be immutable in a local database
  • If a package is ever deleted or yanked from a package repository after it was already cached, It-Depends will
    continue to use the cached data unless the cache is cleared with --clear-cache

Quickstart 🚀

$ pip3 install it-depends

Running it 🏃

Run it-depends in the root of the source repository you would like to analyze:

$ cd /path/to/project
$ it-depends

or alternatively point it to the path directly:

$ it-depends /path/to/project

or alternatively specify a package from a public package repository:

$ it-depends pip:numpy
$ it-depends apt:[email protected]
$ it-depends npm:lodash@>=4.17.0

It-Depends will output the full dependency hierarchy in JSON format. Additional output formats such
as Graphviz/Dot are available via the --output-format option.

It-Depends can automatically try to match packages against the OSV vulnerability database with the
--audit option. This is a best-effort matching as it is based on package names, which might not always consistent.
Any discovered vulnerabilities are added to the JSON output.

It-Depends attempts to parallelize as much of its effort as possible. To limit the maximum number of parallel tasks, use
the --max-workers option.

By default, It-Depends recursively resolves all packages’ dependencies to construct a complete dependency graph. The
depth of the recursion can be limited using the --depth-limit option. For example,

$ it-depends pip:graphtage --depth-limit 1

will only enumerate the direct dependencies of Graphtage.

Examples 🧑‍🏫

Here is an example of running It-Depends on its own source repository:

This is the resulting json
with all the discovered dependencies.
This is the resulting Graphviz dot file
producing this

This is the resulting dependency graph:

It-Depends’ Dependencies 🎭

JavaScript requires npm
Rust requires cargo
Python requires pip
C/C++ requires autotools and/or cmake
Several native dependencies are resolved using Ubuntu’s file to path database apt-file, but this is seamlessly
handled through an Ubuntu docker container on other distributions and operating systems
Currently docker is used to resolve native dependencies

Development 👷

$ git clone https://github.com/trailofbits/it-depends
$ cd it-depends
$ python3 -m venv venv  # Optional virtualenv
$ ./venv/bin/activate   # Optional virtualenv
$ pip3 install -e '.[dev]'
$ git config core.hooksPath ./hooks  # Optionally enable git commit hooks for linting

License and Acknowledgements 📃️

This research was developed by Trail of Bits based upon work supported by DARPA under Contract No. HR001120C0084 (Distribution Statement A, Approved for Public Release: Distribution Unlimited). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Government or DARPA.

Felipe Manzano and Evan Sultanik are
the active maintainers, but Alessandro Gario,
Eric Kilmer, Alexander Remie, and Henrik Brodin all made significant
contributions to the tool’s inception and development.

It-Depends is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0. Contact us if you’re looking for an exception to the terms.

© 2021, Trail of Bits.