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Why Every DevOps Engineer Should Know How to Read a Vulnerability Database
Govardhana M K
April 12, 2025
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TechOps Examples
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Along with a use case deep dive, we identify the remote job opportunities, top news, tools, and articles in the TechOps industry.
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IN TODAY'S EDITION
🧠 Use Case
Why Every DevOps Engineer Should Know How to Read a Vulnerability Database
🚀 Top News
👀 Remote Jobs
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🧠 USE CASE
Why Every DevOps Engineer Should Know How to Read a Vulnerability Database
If there's one area DevOps engineers often overlook until it's too late, it's understanding how and where vulnerabilities show up in the tools we automate with.
Let me give you a real example from this week.
I was browsing osv.dev, a public vulnerability database, filtering for terraform.
What came up was a list of Terraform providers that had newly published vulnerabilities.
It included real providers like:
terraform-provider-grafana
terraform-provider-tls
terraform-provider-random
And all of them had recent disclosures, some as new as 7 or 8 hours ago.
These are not obscure tools. These are actively used in CI/CD pipelines, IaC modules, and production environments.
If you are using terraform-provider-tls to generate keys or random to create secrets and IDs, a vulnerable version means your secrets could be less random or your keys could be weaker than expected.
So what does a vulnerability database actually do for you?
First, it tells you what’s wrong and where. In the screenshot I shared, each row gives you:
A unique ID of the issue (CGA-* in this case, Chainguard’s format)
The package or provider affected
Whether a fix is available
When it was last updated
Most people stop there.
Now Let's Get Practical
How to Check What You Use
terraform providers
This gives you a full list of required providers with version numbers.
To see exact versions in use, especially if pinned:
cat .terraform.lock.hcl
This lock file is your single source of truth for version mapping. Look for blocks like:
provider "registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/random" {
version = "x.y.z"
constraints = ">= x.y.z-1"
hashes = [...] }
Take random, version x.y.z, search for it in osv.dev, and see if it's listed.
What I Recommend for Every DevOps Engineer
Pin all provider versions
Always use version constraints, and commit the .terraform.lock.hcl file in version control.
Add a pre merge vulnerability check
You can use curl and jq in a GitHub Actions step to check osv.dev or integrate tools like tfsec or grype to inspect binaries.
If your provider is affected and fix is available
Upgrade
Run a plan and validate with
terraform planApply only after checking for behavior drift in non-prod
Security isn't someone else's job anymore. If your team pushes infrastructure as code, then you're also pushing software dependencies and those have CVEs, just like app libraries.
If you're not checking vulnerability databases for your IaC tooling, you're operating blind.
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