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Binary Discovery

FOSSA supports the ability to flag all binary dependencies discovered in your project source tree as unlicensed dependencies via an opt-in flag.

The core idea behind this feature is that some organizations wish to validate all potential sources of intellectual property rights, and binaries are potential sources of intellectual property rights data for which we typically cannot automatically discover licensing information.

Discovery

Find all files that contain a NUL (0) byte in the first 8000 bytes of the file.

Analysis

The following strategies are implemented in a "fallback" manner, meaning that for any matching file extension we try strategies in the order listed here until a strategy succeeds.

File Extension Analysis
.jar or .aar Read pom.xml
.jar or .aar Read MANIFEST.MF
Anything else Create user-defined dependency

Read pom.xml

We unpack the archive and search inside the META-INF directory for pom.xml files. We then select the pom.xml with the shortest path and use that as the representative pom.xml for the JAR.

From the pom.xml we read:

  • project.groupId and project.artifactId are combined to make the dependency description.
  • project.version is used for the dependency version.
  • Entries in project.licenses are extracted for their name field, which are concatenated and used as the dependency license.

Read MANIFEST.MF

We unpack the archive and search inside for a META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file.

From that file we read:

  • Bundle-SymbolicName, if present, is used for the dependency description. If Bundle-SymbolicName is not present, we fallback to Implementation-Title.
  • Implementation-Version is used for the dependency version.

Create user-defined dependency

Binaries discovered via this feature are displayed in the FOSSA UI as user dependencies.

The name of the dependency is the path to the binary within the project, and the version of the dependency is the hash of the binary file that was discovered. The description of the dependency is "Binary discovered in source tree".