Technologies¶

KICS support scanning multiple technologies, in the next sections you will find more details about each technology.

Ansible¶

KICS supports scanning Ansible files with .yaml extension.

KICS can decrypt Ansible Vault files on the fly. For that, you need to define the environment variable ANSIBLE_VAULT_PASSWORD_FILE.

Azure Resource Manager¶

KICS supports scanning Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates with .json extension. To build ARM JSON templates from Bicep code check the official ARM documentation and here to understand the differences between ARM JSON templates and Bicep

Buildah¶

KICS supports scanning Buildah files with .sh extension.

CloudFormation¶

KICS supports scanning CloudFormation templates with .json or .yaml extension.

Docker¶

KICS supports scanning Docker files named Dockerfile or with .dockerfile extension.

DockerCompose¶

KICS supports scanning DockerCompose files with .yaml extension.

Helm¶

KICS supports scanning Helm by rendering charts and running Kubernetes queries against the rendered manifest.

The charts file structure must be as explained by Helm: https://helm.sh/docs/topics/charts/#the-chart-file-structure.

Results are displayed against original Helm files:

Service With External Load Balance, Severity: MEDIUM, Results: 1
Description: Service has an external load balancer, which may cause accessibility from other networks and the Internet
Platform: Kubernetes

        [1]: /charts/nginx-ingress/templates/controller-service.yaml:20

                019:     release: {{ template "nginx-ingress.releaseLabel" . }}
                020:   name: {{ template "nginx-ingress.controller.fullname" . }}
                021: spec:

Kubernetes¶

KICS supports scanning Kubernetes manifests with .yaml extension.

OpenAPI¶

KICS supports scanning Swagger 2.0 and OpenAPI 3.0 specs with .json and .yaml extension.

Google Deployment Manager¶

KICS supports scanning Google Deployment Manager files with .yaml extension.

gRPC¶

KICS supports scanning gRPC files with .proto extension.

Terraform¶

KICS supports scanning Terraform's HCL files with .tf extension and input variables using terraform.tfvars or files with .auto.tfvars extension that are in same directory of .tf files.

Terraform Plan¶

KICS supports scanning terraform plans given in JSON. The planned_values will be extracted, built in a way that KICS can understand, and scanned as a normal terraform file.

Results will point to the plan file.

To get terraform plan in JSON format simply run the command:

terraform show -json plan-sample.tfplan > plan-sample.tfplan.json

Terraform Modules¶

KICS supports some official modules for AWS that can be found on Terraform registry, you can see the supported modules list in the libraries folder common.json file. This means KICS can find issues in verified modules listed on this json.

Currently, KICS does not support unofficial or custom modules.

Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF)¶

KICS supports scanning CDKTF output JSON. It recognizes it through the fields metadata, stackName, and terraform.

To get your CDKTF output JSON, run the following command inside the directory that contains your app:

cdktf synth

You can also run the command cdktf synth --json to display it in the terminal.

Limitations¶

Ansible¶

At the moment, KICS does not support a robust approach to identifying Ansible samples. The identification of these samples is done through exclusion. When a YAML sample is not a CloudFormation, Google Deployment Manager, Helm, Kubernetes or OpenAPI sample, KICS recognize it as Ansible.

Thus, KICS recognize other YAML samples (that are not Ansible) as Ansible, e.g. GitHub Actions samples. However, you can ignore these samples by writing #kics-scan ignore on the top of the file. For more details, please read this documentation.

Terraform¶

Although KICS support variables and interpolations, KICS does not support functions and enviroment variables. In case of variables used as function parameters, it will parse as wrapped expression, so the following function call:

resource "aws_launch_configuration" "example" {
  image_id      = data.aws_ami.ubuntu.id
  instance_type = "${concat(list("${var.name}", "${var.other_name}"), var.node_tags)}"
  spot_price    = var.price
  user_data_base64 = "${var.data}=="
}

Considering var.data = "a123B" and var.price = 1.023, it would be parsed like the following example:

resource "aws_launch_configuration" "example" {
  image_id      = data.aws_ami.ubuntu.id
  instance_type = "${concat(list("${var.name}", "${var.other_name}"), var.node_tags)}"
  spot_price    = 1.023
  user_data_base64 = "a123B=="
}