Re: modifying pkg-audit to ignore specified vulns

On Tue, Aug 18, 2026, at 9:17 AM, Michael Gmelin wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:27:41 -0400
> "Dan Langille" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I use periodic/security/410.pkg-audit as part of a Nagios reporting
>> tool. This monitoring check lets me know when a particular host has a
>> vuln. I have used it, or something like it, for years.
>> 
>> Alert fatigue is a real issue. Sometimes it takes months for given
>> known vuln to be fixed. In the meantime, a sea of red covers the
>> Nagios page making it difficult to see new / other vulns.
>> 
>> My goal: selectively silence a vuln.
>> 
>> Background: Back in April, I posted about this issue on Mastodon.
>> One solution, for ignoring vulns on a given port, worked.
>> https://bsd.network/web/@[email protected]/115925654143396302
>> 
>> However, now I want to modify this approach and ignore a list of
>> vulns.
>> 
>> In short, alter 410.pkg-audit to use a user-specified file and to
>> ignore upon any vulns specified in that file.
>> 
>> My short idea:
>> 
>> 1 - use the --file option on pkg-audit
>> 2 - using /var/db/pkg/vuln.xml as input, remove the vuln you don't
>> want to see 3 - output the results to a new file, say:
>> /var/db/pkg/vuln-filtered.xml 4 - run pkg-audit -f
>> /var/db/pkg/vuln-filtered.xml
>> 
>> For step 2, the file is XML and I'm sure there are many tools to
>> choose from which will delete based on vid in this:
>> 
>> 6d3488ae-2e0f-11f1-88c7-00a098b42aeb
>> 0be929a5-2e0f-11f1-88c7-00a098b42aeb
>> 
>> I'm posting in the hopes that someone takes up this challenge and
>> codes something up. I'm happy to test, but can't do the coding.
>> 
>
> Hi Dan,
>
> I've been using something like this locally for a while. I polished it
> a bit and added[0] it as security/periodic-filter-vuxml to the ports
> tree. It's intentionally simple, testing is welcome, see pkg-message
> for usage.
>
> It basically adds a periodic job that runs prior to 405/410.pkg-audit,
> which downloads the vulnerability database if needed and removes entries
> as configured. No component/code of pkg is modified.

I like the independent-of-pkg approach, and the idea of running the script
just before is a good idea.

At https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/security/periodic-filter-vuxml/files/400.filter-vuxml.in#n80
how does that for-loop work? I had anticipated some kind of xml / perl script for that.
This seems to be entirely bourne shell. What magic is that?

-- 
  Dan Langille
  [email protected]