Re: modifying pkg-audit to ignore specified vulns

On Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:14:14 -0400
"Dan Langille" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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?
> 

It's assembling command line arguments to be fed to xmlstarlet in line
96 (delete by xpath specification).

Cheers
Michael

-- 
Michael Gmelin