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OWASP Dependency Check - Improve update speed

Yesterday I introduced you the OWASP Dependency check tool as a way to scan your projects against known vulnerabilities. I showed how to add the OWASP Dependency check to your Azure DevOps build pipeline.

What I didn’t mention yesterday is that executing the OWASP Dependency Check can be really slow. This is because before it can start a scan, it needs to download a vulnerability database.

The tool uses the National Vulnerability Database(NVD) provided by NIST.

So the first time you run the task, it can happen that you get a timeout like below:

The good news is that you can improve the download speed by requesting an API key from the NVD website. Therefore use the following link: https://nvd.nist.gov/developers/request-an-api-key.

Once you have received your API key, you can update the OWASP Dependency Check task in your build pipeline to use it:

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