KICS Github Action

Integrate KICS into your GitHub workflows, using KICS Github Action to make your IaC more secure

KICS (pronounced as 'kick-s') or Kicscan is an open source solution for static code analysis of Infrastructure as Code.

Keeping Infrastructure as Code Secure (in short KICS) is a must-have for any cloud native project. With KICS, finding security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and infrastructure misconfigurations happens early in the development cycle, when fixing these is straightforward and cheap.

It is as simple as running a CLI tool, making it easy to integrate into any project CI.

Supported Platforms

           
           

   

Please find more info in the official website: kics.io

Inputs

Variable	Example Value	Description	Type	Required	Default
path	terraform/main.tf,Dockerfile	paths to a file or directories to scan, comma separated list	String	Yes	N/A
ignore_on_exit	results	defines which non-zero exit codes should be ignored (all, results, errors, none)	String	No	none
fail_on	high,medium	comma separated list of which severities returns exit code !=0	String	No	high,medium,low,info
timeout	75	number of seconds the query has to execute before being canceled	String	No	60
profiling	CPU	turns on profiler that prints resource consumption in the logs during the execution (CPU, MEM)	String	No	N/A
config_path	./kics.config	path to configuration file	String	No	N/A
platform_type	terraform,ansible	case insensitive list of platform types to scan	String	No	All platforms
exclude_paths	./shouldNotScan/*,somefile.txt	exclude paths from scan, supports glob, comma separated list	String	No	N/A
exclude_queries	a227ec01-f97a-4084-91a4-47b350c1db54	exclude queries by providing the query ID, comma separated list	String	No	N/A
exclude_categories	'Observability,Networking and Firewall'	exclude categories by providing its name, comma separated list	String	No	N/A
exclude_results	'd4a1fa80-d9d8-450f-87c2-e1f6669c41f8'	exclude results by providing the similarity ID of a result	String	No	N/A
output_formats	'json,sarif'	formats in which the results report will be exported	String	No	json
output_path	results.json	file path to store result in json format	String	No	N/A
payload_path	/tmp/mypayload.json	file path to store source internal representation in JSON format	String	No	N/A
queries		path to directory with queries (default "./assets/queries")	String	No	./assets/queries downloaded with the binaries
verbose	true	verbose scan	Boolean	No	false

Simple usage example

    # Steps represent a sequence of tasks that will be executed as part of the job
    steps:
    # Checks-out your repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so your job can access it
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    # Scan Iac with kics
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/[email protected]
      with:
        # scanning two directories: ./terraform/ ./cfn-templates/ plus a single file
        path: 'terraform,cfn-templates,my-other-sub-folder/Dockerfile'
        output_path: 'results.json'
    # Display the results in json format
    - name: display kics results
      run: |
        cat results.json

Workflow failures

By default KICS will fail your workflow on any results found.

Fail by severity usage example

If want your pipeline just to fail on HIGH and MEDIUM severity results and KICS engine execution errors:

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/[email protected]
      with:
        path: 'terraform,my-other-sub-folder/Dockerfile'
        fail_on: high,medium
        output_path: 'results.json'
    - name: display kics results
      run: |
        cat results.json

Don't fail on results

If you want KICS to ignore the results and return exit status code 0 unless a KICS engine error happens:

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/[email protected]
      with:
        path: 'terraform'
        ignore_on_exit: results
        output_path: 'results.json'
    - name: display kics results
      run: |
        cat results.json

Profiling KICS

You can only enable one profiler at a time, CPU or MEM.

📝   Please note that execution time may be impacted by enabling performance profiler due to sampling

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/[email protected]
      with:
        path: 'terraform'
        profiling: MEM
        output_path: 'results.json'
    - name: display kics results
      run: |
        cat results.json

Uploading SARIF report

name: scan with KICS and upload SARIF

on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [master]

jobs:
  kics-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: kics-action
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Mkdir results-dir
        # make sure results dir is created
        run: mkdir -p results-dir
      - name: Run KICS Scan with SARIF result
        uses: checkmarx/[email protected]
        with:
          path: 'terraform'
          # when provided with a directory on output_path
          # it will generate the specified reports file named 'results.{extension}'
          # in this example it will generate:
          # - results-dir/results.json
          # - results-dir/results.sarif
          output_path: results-dir
          platform_type: terraform
          output_formats: 'json,sarif'
          exclude_paths: "terraform/gcp/big_data.tf,terraform/azure"
          # seek query id in it's metadata.json
          exclude_queries: 0437633b-daa6-4bbc-8526-c0d2443b946e
      - name: Show results
        run: |
          cat results-dir/results.sarif
          cat results-dir/results.json
      - name: Upload SARIF file
        uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v1
        with:
          sarif_file: results-dir/results.sarif

Using configuration file

Check configuration file reference for more options.

name: scan with KICS using config file

on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [master]

jobs:
  kics-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: kics-action
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Mkdir results-dir
        # make sure results dir is created
        run: mkdir -p results-dir
      - name: Create config file
        # creating a heredoc config file
        run: |
          cat <<EOF >>kics.config
          {
            "exclude-categories": "Encryption",
            "exclude-paths": "terraform/gcp/big_data.tf,terraform/gcp/gcs.tf",
            "log-file": true,
            "minimal-ui": false,
            "no-color": false,
            "no-progress": true,
            "output-path": "./results-dir",
            "payload-path": "file path to store source internal representation in JSON format",
            "preview-lines": 5,
            "report-formats": "json,sarif",
            "type": "terraform",
            "verbose": true
          }
          EOF
      - name: Run KICS Scan using config
        uses: checkmarx/[email protected]
        with:
          path: 'terraform'
          config_path: ./kics.config
      - name: Upload SARIF file
        uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v1
        with:
          sarif_file: results-dir/results.sarif

How To Contribute

We welcome issues to and pull requests against this repository!

License

KICS Github Action

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.