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    Prisma Cloud vulnerability feed

    Information on threat intelligence and vulnerability data on Prisma Cloud is available through the Prisma Cloud Intelligence Stream(IS) feed. You can search for specific CVE on the CVE Viewer.

    Pre-filled CVEs

    On Prisma Cloud, you may find vulnerabilities with a CVE identifier that neither MITRE nor NVD is reporting or is actively analyzing. A pre-filled CVE is the result of an analysis conducted by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers. The researchers manually review the details of each vulnerability, identify the correct range of affected releases and deliver the data to IS.
    Many vulnerabilities in open-source software are assigned with a CVE ID and promptly analyzed by NVD and Linux distribution vendors. However, some vulnerabilities take a long time to be analyzed, sometimes weeks or even months. Having a CVE but no analysis means users have no information on the severity, affected releases, or description of the vulnerability and thereby making it impossible to defend against these vulnerabilities.
    Let’s examine an example scenario. Security researchers find a vulnerability in an open-source project. The vulnerability details are publicly discussed in the project’s bug tracker, e.g. in a GitHub issue. Following the discussion, the issue is fixed and a CVE ID is assigned to the issue. At this stage, NVD analysis takes place, and it may take multiple days for the NVD site to be updated with a description and the affected releases range (CPE). Instead of waiting for the official analysis to complete, our researchers evaluate the vulnerability and insert the data into Prisma Cloud feeds quickly, preventing any delay in remediation of the vulnerability. When the NVD entry is fully updated, Prisma Cloud uses the official data from NVD.

    PRISMA-* IDs

    You may also find vulnerabilities marked with a PRISMA-* identifier. These vulnerabilities lack a CVE ID. Many vulnerabilities are publicly discussed or patched without a CVE ever being assigned to them. While monitoring open-source vulnerabilities, our team identifies vulnerabilities you need to be aware of and assigns PRISMA IDs to them whenever applicable.
    For example, let’s review PRISMA-2021-0020. A user found a bug in the Python package click and opened an issue through its open-source repository on GitHub. Our research team found this issue and determined it explains a valid security vulnerability. Although no CVE was assigned to this vulnerability, our team promptly assigned it a PRISMA identifier and analyzed the correct range of affected releases. Affected customers were alerted to this vulnerability despite the lack of any public vulnerability identifier. If a CVE is ever assigned to the same vulnerability that has a Prisma ID, the CVE takes over and the PRISMA ID entry is fully replaced. Read more about the correlation between PRISMA IDs and CVEs in this blog post.
    The following diagram shows the PRISMA ID and Pre-filled CVEs assignment flow:

    PRISMA-* ID Syntax

    PRISMA ID syntax consists of the PRISMA prefix, year of release, and a sequence of four digits. For example, "PRISMA-2020-1234". This format is intentionally similar to that used by CVE IDs. There is absolutely no correlation between the sequence used for PRISMA IDs to that of CVEs released the same year. There is also no grouping of PRISMA IDs. That is, there is no correlation between adjacent PRISMA ID sequences.

    Investigating PRISMA-* Vulnerabilities

    The vulnerability description includes the necessary information required to understand the vulnerability. The severity is carefully determined by our team based on CVSS scoring. You may also access the ID link to find the original source that resulted in the assignment of the PRISMA ID. This will likely be an external advisory, a GitHub (or another bug tracker) issue, or it may directly lead you to the fix commit (pull request) when there is no correlating informational page.

    Supported Packages and Languages

    The following list shows the application types that are currently supported. You can view all the packages installed on an image or host in Scan reports under
    Monitor > Vulnerabilities > Images/Hosts
    .
    • Package
       - supported Operating Systems packages, such as an RPM (Red Hat and derived distributions), dpkg/deb (Debian and derived distributions), or apk (Alpine Linux).
    • Jar
       - the Java Archive format, which is a zip file with a standard structure. The war file format, or web app archive, is also supported.
    • Python
       - a Python library.
    • Nodejs
       - a Node.js library.
    • Gem
       - a Ruby gem library.
    • Go
       - a GoLang library
    • App
       - a binary associated with a well-known application, such as Nginx or PostgreSQL.
    For an application that originates from an OS package, the vulnerability data for CVEs are sourced from the relevant feed for the OS package. In some cases, like with Amazon Linux and Photon OS, this CVE information is provided in security advisories such as Amazon Linux Security Advisories (ALAS) for Amazon, and PHSA for Photon. In such cases, the correlation for the relevant vulnerabilities is limited. As an example, when the application "Python" is sourced from an Amazon Python package, CVEs found for the python application (as a binary) will not be correlated with the relevant Amazon CVEs from the ALAS.

    Unpackaged software

    Typically, the software is added to container images and hosts with a package manager, such as apt, yum, and npm. Prisma Cloud typically uses the package manager’s metadata to discover installed components and versions, and compares this data against a real-time CVE feed in the Intelligence Stream(IS).
    Sometimes, you might install software without a package manager. For example, the software might be built from a source and then added to an image with the Dockerfile ADD instruction, or your developers might unzip software from a tarball to a location on a host, and utilize the application. In these cases, there is no package manager data associated with the application.
    Prisma Cloud uses a variety of analysis techniques to detect metadata about software not installed by package managers. These are purpose-built differently for images and hosts.
    This analysis augments existing vulnerability detection and blocking mechanisms, giving you a single view of all vulnerabilities, regardless of how the software is installed (distro’s package manager, language runtime package manager, or without a package manager).

    Supported apps

    The type of applications supported in the IS are:
    • .NET Core
    • ASP.NET Core
    • BusyBox
    • Consul
    • CRI-O
    • Docker
    • GO
    • Istio
    • OMI
    • Vault
    • Websphere Application Server
    • Webshpere Open Liberty
    • Kubernetes
    • OpenShift
    • Jenkins
    • Envoy
    • Hashicorp Vault
    • Hashicorp Consul
    • WordPress
    • Redis
    • Nginx
    • Mongo
    • MySQL
    • Httpd
    • Java- Oracle, openJDK
    • Apache
    • Postgres
    • Node
    • Ruby
    • Python
    • PHP
    You can view the CVEs detected for each application type in
    Manage > System > Intelligence
    .

    Prisma ID FAQs

    • Why use PRISMA-IDs?
      We are committed to ensuring that the Prisma Cloud Intelligence Stream provides the most accurate and up-to-date vulnerability information.
      Through the Intelligence Stream, Prisma Cloud should be able to alert on any relevant vulnerabilities that exist in scanned environments, regardless of having a CVE or not. Our researchers monitor open-source code repositories continuously to detect publicly discussed but undisclosed vulnerabilities that are not tracked under a CVE record. Upon finding such a vulnerability, the researchers complete a full analysis of the vulnerability including assessing its severity and describing its impact, and finally assign a PRISMA ID. The Intelligence Stream is shortly thereafter updated with the new entry, and users immediately benefit from the detection of the vulnerability by Prisma Cloud.
      This process allows Prisma Cloud users to be better informed and secure from vulnerabilities that are otherwise not detected by regular vulnerability management tools.
    • Why not wait for a CVE-ID?
      Although most vulnerabilities in open-source are assigned CVEs quickly after being discovered, some vulnerabilities are not assigned a CVE for various reasons. In some cases, maintainers are unaware of the process to assign CVEs, ignorant of the importance of having a CVE, or may even refuse to have CVE IDs assigned to their projects.
      Prisma Cloud researchers actively encourage all maintainers to assign CVE IDs to security vulnerabilities in their projects. We partner with NVD and MITRE to ensure that information regarding known vulnerabilities is public and available to everyone in the industry. PRISMA IDs are not meant to be a replacement for CVEs – PRISMA IDs are assigned to ensure our users are protected from any known threat regardless of whether a CVE was assigned to it or not.
      Palo Alto Networks is a CVE Numbering Authorities (CNA); we assign CVE IDs to any zero-day vulnerability we discover. The purpose of PRISMA IDs is to track vulnerabilities that were already public knowledge at the time we identified them, but were not tracked under a CVE ID.
    • Why not all PRISMA-IDs get assigned with a CVE ID?
      As mentioned above, although we do encourage all maintainers to assign CVEs to the vulnerabilities found in their projects, we keep seeing a lot of undisclosed vulnerabilities that are publicly discussed. We would be happy to see all PRISMA IDs be replaced with a CVE ID, however, we do have limited resources - and simply cannot assign a CVE for each vulnerability. For zero days found by our research team, we follow the responsible disclosure process and ask the vendor to assign a CVE or offer the assistance of Palo Alto Networks as a CNA.
    • Can PRISMA-IDs be found on NVD or MITRE?
      Public vulnerabilities identified by our researchers, before a CVE is associated with them, are assigned a PRISMA-* identifier. You may access the reference link to get more information about the source through which our researchers discovered the vulnerability.
    • Do you have a way to correlate PRISMA-ID to CVE when it is assigned a CVE?
      Through an ongoing maintenance process, PRISMA-IDs are replaced with a corresponding CVE ID when it is created.
    • PRISMA-XXXX disappeared, what happened?
      When a vulnerability with a Prisma ID is assigned a CVE ID, the PRISMA ID is replaced with the new CVE. Findings will display the official CVE ID instead.
    • What is the “Published Date” in Console?
      The Published date is the date that the CVE was published by the feed source or by NVD. This information is taken from the relevant feed - either the vendor feed or NVD.
      The date a CVE is published in NVD is not the date it was analyzed. The CVE can be published in NVD and only later updated with the analysis.
    • Why do I see a newly added CVE with an old published/fixed date?
      The Published Date of the CVE is the date when the vendor published it first. The CVE may have been added to the IS after the published date because the feed is constantly up