Java

Trivy supports four types of Java scanning: JAR/WAR/PAR/EAR, pom.xml, *gradle.lockfile and *.sbt.lock files.

Each artifact supports the following scanners:

Artifact	SBOM	Vulnerability	License
JAR/WAR/PAR/EAR	✓	✓	✓1
pom.xml	✓	✓	✓
*gradle.lockfile	✓	✓	✓
*.sbt.lock	✓	✓	-

The following table provides an outline of the features Trivy offers.

Artifact	Internet access	Dev dependencies	Dependency graph	Position	Detection Priority
JAR/WAR/PAR/EAR	Trivy Java DB	Include	-	-	Not needed
pom.xml	Maven repository 2	Exclude	✓	✓3	-
*gradle.lockfile	-	Exclude	✓	✓	Not needed
*.sbt.lock	-	Exclude	-	✓	Not needed

These may be enabled or disabled depending on the target. See here for the detail.

JAR/WAR/PAR/EAR

To find information about your JAR⁴ file, Trivy parses pom.properties and MANIFEST.MF files in your JAR⁴ file and takes required properties⁵.

If those files don't exist or don't contain enough information - Trivy will try to find this JAR⁴ file in trivy-java-db. The Java DB will be automatically downloaded/updated when any JAR⁴ file is found. It is stored in the cache directory.

!!! warning "EXPERIMENTAL" Finding JARs in trivy-java-db is an experimental function.

Base JAR⁴ may contain inner JARs⁴ within itself. To find information about these JARs⁴, the same logic is used as for the base JAR⁴.

table format only contains the name of root JAR⁴ . To get the full path to inner JARs⁴ use the json format.

Licenses

Trivy detects licenses for a JAR⁴ from two sources, in this order:

1. Embedded POM — the <licenses> block of the embedded META-INF/maven/<groupId>/<artifactId>/pom.xml, matched to the package by groupId:artifactId.
2. License files — LICENSE, LICENCE or COPYRIGHT files (including variants like LICENSE.txt) located at the JAR⁴ root or directly under META-INF/. Their content is classified with the license classifier. A license file carries no groupId:artifactId, so it is attached only when the JAR⁴ contains a single artifact; in uber/shaded JARs⁴ (multiple artifacts) the owner is ambiguous and such files are skipped.

Notes and limitations:

• Coverage is limited: many JARs⁴ declare a license only in a parent POM (which is not expanded in the embedded pom.xml) or ship no Maven descriptor at all.
• A single license file may bundle the texts of third-party components (e.g. Spring or Tomcat artifacts), so a package can be reported with several licenses found in that file, not only its own.

pom.xml

Trivy parses your pom.xml file and tries to find files with dependencies from these local locations.

• project directory⁶
• relativePath field⁷
• local repository directory⁸.

remote repositories

If your machine doesn't have the necessary files - Trivy tries to find the information about these dependencies in the remote repositories:

• repositories from pom files
• maven central repository

Trivy reproduces Maven's repository selection and priority:

• for snapshot artifacts:
  • check only snapshot repositories from pom files (if exists)
• for other artifacts:
  • check release repositories from pom files (if exists)
  • check maven central

!!! Note Trivy only takes information about packages. We don't take a list of vulnerabilities for packages from the maven repository. Information about data sources for Java you can see here.

You can disable connecting to the maven repository with the --offline-scan flag. The --offline-scan flag does not affect the Trivy database. The vulnerability database will be downloaded anyway.

!!! Warning Trivy may skip some dependencies (that were not found on your local machine) when the --offline-scan flag is passed.

supported scopes

Trivy only scans import, compile, runtime and empty maven scopes. Other scopes and Optional dependencies are not currently being analyzed.

empty dependency version

There are cases when Trivy cannot determine the version of dependencies:

• Unable to determine the version from the parent because the parent is not reachable;
• The dependency uses a hard requirement with more than one version.

In these cases, Trivy uses an empty version for the dependency.

!!! Warning Trivy doesn't detect child dependencies for dependencies without a version.

maven-invoker-plugin

Typically, the integration tests directory (**/[src|target]/it/*/pom.xml) of maven-invoker-plugin doesn't contain actual pom.xml files and should be skipped to avoid noise.

Trivy marks dependencies from these files as the development dependencies and skip them by default. If you need to show them, use the --include-dev-deps flag.

Gradle.lock

gradle.lock files only contain information about used dependencies.

!!!note All necessary files are checked locally. Gradle file scanning doesn't require internet access.

By default, Trivy doesn't report development dependencies. Use the --include-dev-deps flag to include them in the results.

Dependency-tree

!!! warning "EXPERIMENTAL" This feature might change without preserving backwards compatibility. Trivy finds child dependencies from *.pom files in the cache⁹ directory.

But there is no reliable way to determine direct dependencies (even using other files). Therefore, we mark all dependencies as indirect to use logic to guess direct dependencies and build a dependency tree.

Licenses

Trivy also can detect licenses for dependencies.

Make sure that you have cache⁹ directory to find licenses from *.pom dependency files.

SBT

build.sbt.lock files only contain information about used dependencies. This requires a lockfile generated using the sbt-dependency-lock plugin.

!!!note All necessary files are checked locally. SBT file scanning doesn't require internet access.

Footnotes

1. License detection is limited. See Licenses for details. ↩

2. Uses maven repository to get information about dependencies. Internet access required. ↩

3. To avoid confusion, Trivy only finds locations for direct dependencies from the base pom.xml file. ↩

4. It means *.jar, *.war, *.par and *.ear file ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵

5. ArtifactID, GroupID and Version ↩

6. e.g. when parent pom.xml file has ../pom.xml path ↩

7. When you use dependency path in relativePath field in pom.xml file ↩

8. /Users/<username>/.m2/repository (for Linux and Mac) and C:/Users/<username>/.m2/repository (for Windows) by default ↩

9. The supported directories are $GRADLE_USER_HOME/caches and $HOME/.gradle/caches (%HOMEPATH%\.gradle\caches for Windows). ↩ ↩²