Kali Linux

kics : Find security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and infrastructure misconfigurations

KICS, which stands for Keeping Infrastructure as Code Secure, is an essential component of every cloud-native project and is open source. Use KICS by Checkmarx to identify security flaws, legal compliance problems, and infrastructure misconfigurations early in the development cycle of your infrastructure-as-code.

How it Works

KICS’s built-in extensibility is what makes it so strong and well-liked. Achieving this extensibility entails:

Queries are fully flexible and changeable heuristic rules. These are simple to alter, expand upon, and include.

a robust but still straightforward architecture that makes it simple to add support for new Infrastructure as Code solutions quickly.

KICS was developed using Open Policy Agent and is entirely open source (OPA).

Rego was a natural choice as a query language to implement security queries, while Golang’s speed, simplicity, and dependability made it the ideal choice for creating KICS.

For AWS, GCP, Azure, and other cloud providers, we have created more than a thousand ready-to-use queries that cover a wide range of vulnerabilities checks.

High-Level Architecture

KICS’s extendable pipeline of IaC language parsers and pluggable architecture make it simple to incorporate additional IaC languages and queries.

A command-line interface, parser, queries execution engine, IaC providers, security queries, and results writer are the key parts of KICS at a high level.

  • Provides CLI input to KICS using the command line interface.
  • The parser is in charge of processing the input IaC files (terraform and others)
  • Providers of IaC => IaC language is transformed into a normalised JSON \sQueries Execution Engine: uses pre-built REGO queries for each security and misconfiguration against normalised JSON Security Queries.
  • Writer => Outputs data in JSON format.

Execution Flow

R K

Recent Posts

Bash Scripting Best Practices Every Beginner Should Know

Introduction Bash scripting is a powerful way to automate Linux tasks, but writing a script…

3 days ago

How To Create A Self-Signed SSL Certificate Using Bash And OpenSSL

Introduction A self-signed SSL certificate is a certificate that is created and signed by the…

3 days ago

How To Debug Bash Scripts Using bash -x And set Commands

Introduction Debugging is an important part of Bash scripting. When a script does not work…

3 days ago

How To Use Cron Jobs With Bash Scripts For Automation

Introduction Cron jobs are used in Linux to run commands or Bash scripts automatically at…

3 days ago

How To Use Pipes In Bash Scripts For Command Chaining

Introduction Pipes are an important feature in Linux and Bash scripting. A pipe allows you…

3 days ago

How To Use grep, awk, And sed In Bash Scripts

Introduction The grep, awk, and sed commands are powerful text-processing tools in Linux. They are…

3 days ago