What is the difference between VEX and ignoring vulnerabilities locally?

What VEX Changes in Vulnerability Triage

VEX is meant to answer a different question from a local ignore rule. It documents whether a reported vulnerability is relevant to a specific product, component, or version in a way that can be shared, reused, and checked by others. That makes it a coordination artifact, not just a scanner setting, and it helps preserve consistent decisions across teams and tools.

Because VEX is maintained by the product owner or another authoritative source, it can express a decision that survives beyond one scan result. Local ignore mechanisms are usually tied to one team’s workflow, so they are useful for immediate noise reduction but they do not create a durable statement about exploitability or applicability. A useful way to think about the split is that VEX describes the software state, while a local ignore describes a local operational choice.

When VEX is used properly, it becomes part of the evidence trail for why a finding was suppressed. That matters when different scanners disagree, when results are shared between development, security, and operations, or when the same dependency appears in multiple products. For a broader treatment of how VEX fits into dependency and release assurance, see the Software Supply Chain Security Guide.

Why Local Ignores Stay Narrow

Local ignore mechanisms are still useful, but only when the decision is intentionally bounded to one team, one environment, or one scan pipeline. They are best for short-term exceptions, noisy findings, and cases where the team has context that cannot yet be expressed as a reusable statement. The trade-off is that the decision is easy to lose, hard to compare across tools, and often invisible outside the immediate workflow.

That narrow scope also means local ignores can drift from the real risk picture. A suppression that made sense for one build image, branch, or deployment target may be wrong for another, yet the rule can remain in place long after the context has changed. If your team depends on local ignores for a recurring issue, that is usually a sign the decision should be promoted into a maintained vulnerability status process rather than left as an ad hoc exception.

Local ignores are therefore an operational control, not a governance control. They reduce immediate friction, but they do not establish a shared position that other teams can trust without re-checking the original context.

When to Prefer VEX Over Ignoring Findings

VEX is the better choice when the question is “does this vulnerability apply here?” and the answer needs to be portable across products, scanners, and stakeholders. It is especially valuable when the same component is scanned in multiple repositories, when suppliers need to communicate vulnerability status downstream, or when teams want suppression decisions to be reviewable and consistent over time. For the underlying SBOM and VEX workflow, the SBOM Guide explains how vulnerability correlation and sharing fit together.

Use a local ignore only when the scope is intentionally limited and the reason is truly local, such as a temporary false positive in one toolchain or a one-off exception for a specific pipeline. If the same justification is likely to recur, or if other teams would benefit from the decision, move the rationale into VEX so the suppression can travel with the software rather than staying trapped in one console. For teams comparing tools and workflows, the Software Supply Chain Security Buyer's Guide is useful for evaluating how products handle VEX and suppression decisions.

If a finding is already being shared with suppliers, downstream consumers, or multiple scanning platforms, VEX is usually the stronger format because it supports consistent interpretation. If the decision is only meant to quiet a single alert in one local context, keep it local and time-bound rather than turning it into an informal policy.

Practitioner Guidance

What to verify: Check whether the suppression decision is about the software itself or only about one team’s workflow. If the same vulnerability status should be trusted outside the originating scanner or repository, it belongs in VEX rather than in a local ignore list.

Decision rule: If the justification can be reused by another team, scanner, or release line without changing its meaning, promote it to VEX. If it depends on a temporary local condition, keep it as a narrow ignore and set an expiry or review point.

Practitioner takeaway: VEX is for durable, transferable vulnerability applicability decisions; local ignores are for temporary, local noise suppression. Treat them as different controls, not interchangeable ways to hide the same finding.

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