Installation

Installation

There are multiple ways to get KICS up and running:

Docker

KICS is available as a Docker image and can be used as follows:

To scan a directory/file on your host you have to mount it as a volume to the container and specify the path on the container filesystem with the -p KICS parameter (see Scan Command Options section below)

docker pull checkmarx/kics:latest
docker run -v {​​​​path_to_host_folder_to_scan}​​​​:/path checkmarx/kics:latest scan -p "/path" -o "/path/"

We also provide alpine based docker image with latest-alpine.

You can see the list of available tags in dockerhub

You can provide your own path to the queries directory with -q CLI option (see CLI Options section below), otherwise the default directory will be used The default ./assets/queries is built-in in the image.

One-liner Install Script

Run the following command to download and install kics. It will detect your current OS and download the appropriate binary package, defaults installation to ./bin and the queries will be placed alongside the binary in ./bin/assets/queries:

curl -sfL 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Checkmarx/kics/master/install.sh' | bash

If you want to place it somewhere else like /usr/local/bin:

sudo curl -sfL 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Checkmarx/kics/master/install.sh' | bash -s -- -b /usr/local/bin

Binary

KICS release process is pretty straightforward. When we're releasing a new version, we'll pack KICS executables for Linux, Windows and macOS operating systems. Our security queries will be included in the ZIP files and tarballs, so that you can scan your IaC code with the out-of-the-box queries.

So all you need is:

1. Go to KICS releases
2. Download KICS binaries based on your OS
3. Extract files
4. Run kics executable with the cli options as described below (note that kics binary should be located in the same directory as queries directory) shell ./kics scan -p '<path-of-your-project-to-scan>' -o '<output-results.json>'

Build from Sources

1. Download and install Go from https://golang.org/dl/
2. Clone the repository: shell git clone https://github.com/Checkmarx/kics.git
3. Build the binaries: shell cd kics make build
4. Kick a scan! shell ./bin/kics scan -p '<path-of-your-project-to-scan>' --report-formats json -o ./results

---

Note: KICS does not execute scan by default anymore.

Next Steps

• Understand how to configure KICS so you can have a better KICS experience.
• Explore KICS commands to see what you can do with KICS.
• Explore supported platforms to see which files you can scan with KICS.
• Explore the queries internals for better understanding how KICS works.
• Explore the output results format and quickly fix the issues detected.
• Contribute if you want to go the extra mile.