Overview
KICS is 100% open source is written in Golang using Open Policy Agent (OPA).
Golang speed, simplicity and reliability made it the perfect choice for writing KICS, while Rego as a query language, was a native choice to implement security queries.
So far have written 1000+ ready-to-use queries that cover a wide range of vulnerabilities checks for AWS, GCP, Azure and other cloud providers.
High Level Architecture
KICS has a pluggable architecture with extensible pipeline of parsing IaC languages, which allows an easy integration of new IaC languages and queries.
At a very high level, KICS is composed of the following main components: a command line interface, parser, queries execution engine, IaC providers, security queries, and results writer.
- Command Line Interface => Provides CLI input to KICS.
- Parser => responsible for parsing input IaC files (terraform and others)
- IaC Providers => Converts IaC language into normalized JSON
- Queries Execution Engine => applies REGO queries against normalized JSON
- Security Queries => pre-built REGO queries for each security and misconfiguration
- Writer => Writes results into JSON format
Execution Flow
The sequence diagram below depicts interaction of the main KICS components:
