• KICS GitHub Action
  • Integrate KICS into your GitHub workflows
    • Supported Platforms
    • Please find more info in the official website: kics.io
  • Inputs
  • Simple usage example
  • Workflow failures
    • Don't fail on results
    • Fail by severity usage example
  • Enabling Pull Request Comment
    • PR Comment Example
  • Annotations
  • Profiling KICS
  • Uploading SARIF report
  • Using configuration file
  • How To Contribute
• License

Integrate KICS into your GitHub workflows

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

Official documentation page docs.kics.io.

Ensure that you're using the latest KICS Github Action release when creating a workflow.

Inputs

Variable	Example Value	Description	Type	Required	Default
enable_comments	true	Enable pull request report comments	Boolean	No	false
enable_jobs_summary	true	Enable report as jobs summary	Boolean	No	false
enable_annotations	true	Enable annotations report	Boolean	No	true
comments_with_queries	true	Add queries in th pull request report comments (available when enable_comments = true)	Boolean	No	false
excluded_column_for_comments_with_queries	description_id,similarity_id,search_line,search_value	Excluded columns for the comment with queries, accepts a comma separated list	String	No	description_id,similarity_id,search_line,search_value
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
exclude_severities	'info,low'	exclude results by providing the severity of a result	String	No	N/A
exclude_gitignore (available only from KICS version 1.6)		disables the exclusion of paths specified within .gitignore file	Boolean	No	false
include_queries	a227ec01-f97a-4084-91a4-47b350c1db54	include only specified list of queries to the scan, cannot be provided with query exclusion flags	String	No	N/A
output_formats	'json,sarif'	formats in which the results report will be exported	String	No	json
output_path	myResults/	file path to store result in json format	String	No	"./"
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
type	Ansible,Dockerfile	case insensitive comma-separated list of platform types to scan (Ansible, AzureResourceManager, CloudFormation, Dockerfile, Kubernetes, OpenAPI, Terraform)	String	No	all types
bom	true	include bill of materials (BoM) in results.json output	Boolean	No	false
disable_full_descriptions	false	disable request for full descriptions and use default vulnerability descriptions	Boolean	false
disable_secrets	false	disable secrets detection	Boolean	false
secrets_regexes_path	./mydir/secrets-config.json	path to custom secrets regex rules configuration file	String	No	N/A
libraries_path	./myLibsDir	path to directory with Rego libraries	String	No	N/A
cloud_provider	aws,azure	list of cloud providers to scan (alicloud, aws, azure, gcp)	String	No	N/A

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@v3
    # Scan Iac with kics
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/kics-github-action@v2.1.20
      with:
        # scanning two directories: ./terraform/ ./cfn-templates/ plus a single file
        path: 'terraform,cfn-templates,my-other-sub-folder/Dockerfile'
        output_path: myResults/
    # Display the results in json format
    - name: display kics results
      run: |
        cat myResults/results.json

Workflow failures

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

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@v3
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/kics-github-action@v2.1.20
      with:
        path: 'terraform'
        ignore_on_exit: results
        output_path: myResults/
    - name: display kics results
      run: |
        cat myResults/results.json

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@v3
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/kics-github-action@v2.1.20
      with:
        path: 'terraform,my-other-sub-folder/Dockerfile'
        fail_on: high,medium
        output_path: myResults/
    - name: display kics results
      run: |
        cat myResults/results.json

Enabling Pull Request Comment

GITHUB_TOKEN enables this github action to access github API and post comments in a pull request:

name: Test KICS action PR comment

on:
  pull_request:

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: run kics Scan
      uses: checkmarx/kics-github-action@v2.1.20
      with:
        path: test/samples/positive1.tf,test/samples/positive2.tf
        token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        output_path: myResults/
        ignore_on_exit: results
        enable_comments: true

PR Comment Example

KICS version: 2.1.5

Category Results HIGH 3 MEDIUM 2 LOW 0 INFO 0 TRACE 0 TOTAL 5	Metric Values Files scanned 2 Files parsed 2 Files failed to scan 0 Total queries 821 Queries failed to execute 0 Execution time 13s

Annotations

After scanning, kics-github-action will add the results as annotations in a pull request:

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@v3
      - name: run kics Scan
        uses: checkmarx/kics-github-action@v2.1.20
        with:
          path: 'terraform'
          profiling: MEM
          output_path: myResults/
      - name: display kics results
        run: |
          cat myResults/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@v3
      - name: Mkdir results-dir
        # make sure results dir is created
        run: mkdir -p results-dir
      - name: Run KICS Scan with SARIF result
        uses: checkmarx/kics-github-action@v2.1.20
        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
          ignore_on_exit: results
          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@v3
        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@v3
      - 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/kics-github-action@v2.1.20
        with:
          path: 'terraform'
          config_path: ./kics.config
      - name: Upload SARIF file
        uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
        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/.