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A command line interface for scanning configuration files with CoGuard

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CoGuard

CoGuard is a comprehensive static analysis tool for IT infrastructure configurations (cloud and on-premise).

Finding and fixing misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities for IaC, devices, containers, cloud settings, and applications. Reduce the noise of CVE notifications and focus on small improvements for big wins.

Table of Contents

Why CoGuard

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is here to stay. The versioning and continuous scanning of every layer of your IT (on premise and cloud) infrastructure is crucial.

CoGuard's team observed that there are a lot of policy checks on the layers communicating to the cloud, but the configurations inside specific compute devices such as physical servers, virtual machines or containers are mostly neglected, or have silo-ed solutions at best.

In order to have static analysis practices for IaC that go as deep as the available tools for code, every layer needs to be equally addressed.

In our practice, we observed that, at times, even an awareness of locations of configuration files is lacking. This is why we created a command line tool helping with discovering those configurations, and scanning them.

CoGuard's CLI combines multiple ways to extract and scan your configuration files.

  1. Docker images: Modern container scanners check for versions of software and libraries installed on those containers, and establish if there are common known vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). The CoGuard CLI is trying to find known configuration files for e.g. web servers or databases, and scans these for security and best practice. Additionally, the last Docker file used to create an image is analyzed as well.
  2. Project Repositories: Modern projects store their infrastructure information inside code repositories for better visibility and traceability. CoGuard can extract Infrastructure as Code (IaC) files and other supported configurations. It also searches for external container references and scans these as well.
  3. Cloud configurations not represented as IaC: Many organizations have either not yet started using IaC tools, or have a hybrid model of part IaC, part manual management. For these cases, we can extract cloud configurations for AWS, Azure or GCP, and scan them as well.

Introduction to the CoGuard CLI

This project is the command line interface to CoGuard, with additional functionality for the auto-discovery of configuration files.

The current release scans for:

  1. Docker images and its contents,
  2. project folders (such as GitHub Repositories) and
  3. will automatically extracted cloud configurations from the AWS, Azure and GCP

It searches for known configuration files of different software packages (like webservers, databases, etc.), and scans these configurations for configuration errors and security best practices.

Installation Instructions

Pre-Requisites

You need to have python3, pip3 and docker installed on your system. Instructions for different operating systems and commands to be used for Python and Pip are provided below.

Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip
Alpine
apk add python3 py3-pip
CentOS/Fedora
sudo yum install -y python3 python3-pip
Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S python python-pip
Mac OS Assuming you are using [Homebrew](https://brew.sh), you have to run
brew install python3
Windows

Download Python3 for Windows using this link, and install it.

Installation

CoGuard CLI can either be pulled from this repository and used directly, or installed via pip:

pip3 install coguard-cli

This is a reminder that it is a requirement to have Docker installed locally.

Installation remarks

Remark 1: It may happen that the folder where pip is installing packages is not in included in PATH. We have observed it on some Ubuntu installations, and on Homebrew Mac installs. For the Linux case, such as Ubuntu, you can find the binary usually under $HOME/.local/bin/coguard, i.e. you run

$HOME/.local/bin/coguard docker-image [<YOUR-IMAGE-NAME-OR-ID>]

For the Mac case, it is often installed under ~/Library/Python/<YOUR_PYTHON_VERSION>/bin/coguard, i.e. you would run

~/Library/Python/<YOUR_PYTHON_VERSION>/bin/coguard docker-image [<YOUR-IMAGE-NAME-OR-ID>]

If you omit the image ID parameter, CoGuard will scan all the images currently stored on your device.

Remark 2: Windows users need to be allowed to create and read symbolic links. This can be achieved using three options:

Option 1 1. Run the CoGuard execution as admin temporarily. This can be achieved by opening the PowerShell or command prompt as administrative user (right click on the icon), or by issuing the command ```shell Start-Process powershell -Verb runAs ``` inside an already open command/Powershell window.
Option 2 2. Run Windows in Developer Mode (instructions on how to run Windows as a developer can be found [here](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/game-bar/guide/developer-mode)).
Option 3 3. Run CoGuard on a Linux virtual machine, e.g. using the Windows subsystem for Linux. This is commonly installed with Docker Desktop for Windows. If you do not have it installed, then installation instructions can be found [here](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install). The installation steps for CoGuard using WSL are equivalent to the pre-requisites and installation steps described for Linux (dependent on the distribution you choose).

How to use it

Any of the following options requires you to create a CoGuard account. After completion, this image check will return the findings of CoGuard on this particular image. You can view the latest historical scan results when logging in to https://portal.coguard.io.

Scanning Docker images

Using the CoGuard CLI, you can run a scan on your local Docker images using

coguard docker-image [scan] [<YOUR-IMAGE-NAME-OR-ID>]

Scanning project repository folders

Using the CoGuard CLI, you can run a scan on your local file repositories using

coguard folder [scan] [<PATH-TO-FOLDER>]

Extracting and scanning cloud configurations (BETA)

Using the CoGuard CLI, you can run a scan a current snapshot of your cloud configurations. This requires you to have the respective cloud CLI tools (aws-cli for AWS, gcloud for GCP or az for Azure) installed and authenticated on your device.

coguard cloud [scan] {aws, azure, gcp}

The extraction may take a couple of minutes, depending on your internet speed.

General scan

To get a general scan, which includes all locally installed Docker images, anything in the current-working directory (recursive) and any installed cloud provider authentication, simply run

coguard scan

Inclusion into CI/CD pipeline

CoGuard can be included as a step in your CI/CD pipeline. CoGuard generates the necessary templates and scripts.

GitHub Actions is available in the current release. To generate e.g. a GitHub Actions YAML which automatically scans your repository on pull request/push, simply type

coguard pipeline github add <PATH_TO_YOUR_REPOSITORY>

Future support is planned for GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Bamboo, CircleCI, etc.

Screenshot and further information

Here is a screenshot of a sample scan:

As you can see, CoGuard also analyzes the last Dockerfile used.

The checks are gathered from different security controls, but also directly from the user manuals of these software projects. At times, known issues for certain versions and security remediations specific to a certain version are being taken into account as well.

Supported Technologies and Roadmap

CoGuard currently supports the the auto-discovery of configuration files inside Docker containers, folders and cloud configuration exports. The full list of configurations files can be found in this folder.

  • Supported Applications & Infrastructure as Code
    • Apache Kafka
    • Apache Tomcat
    • Apache WebServer
    • CloudFormation
    • Dockerfile
    • ElasticSearch
    • Helm
    • Kerberos
    • Kubernetes
    • MongoDB
    • MySQL
    • Netlify
    • NGINX
    • OpenTelemetry Collector
    • PostgreSQL
    • Redis
    • TerraForm
  • Supported Cloud Hosts
    • AWS
    • Azure
    • GCP
    • OVH Cloud
  • Roadmap (Future Support Planned)
    • Ansible
    • Jenkins
    • Bamboo
    • CircleCI
    • OpenAPI
    • Puppet
    • BitBucket Pipelines
    • Contact us for full list or to add a specific request or custom rules

This list will expand in the future. In addition, we are scanning the Dockerfile used to create the images, and will add some Linux configuration files in the near future.

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