The open source vulnerability scanner Trivy has been recently extended to support cloud security posture management (CSPM) capabilities. While initially available only for AWS, Trivy will soon get support for other cloud providers, says Aqua Security.
Trivy is a scanner for vulnerabilities in Kubernetes images, file systems, and Git repositories. Additionally, it can detect configuration issues and hard-coded secrets. The new feature adds an aws command to the trivy CLI which enables scanning live AWS accounts for all the checks defined in the AWS CIS 1.2 benchmarks.
For example, according to the AWS CIS benchmark, a properly configured cloud system should avoid using the root user, ensure multi-factor authentication is enabled for IAM users, make sure that credentials unused for 90 days or longer are disabled, and many more. For each of those checks, a remediation procedure is also defined in the standard.
The first step to use trivy with a live AWS account is authentication, followed by a scan. You can scan all resources in your default zone, as well as resources in a specific region or select a specific service. Additionally, you can filter scan results based on their severity:
$ aws configure
$ trivy aws
$ trivy aws --region=us-west-1
$ trivy aws --service=s3 --region=eu-east-1
$ trivy aws --severity=MEDIUM
The tool also supports several output formats including text tables, JSON, sarif, cosign-vuln, GitHub, and others. Furthermore, Trivy will cache its result for a configurable amount of time to allow you to inspect them without having to run the scan again.
Previous to the new release, Trivy could be used to scan the static configuration files of an AWS services, but not a live AWS account.
Interestingly, Aqua Security offers a paid CSPM SaaS enabling multi-cloud security posture management across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. This solution is based on the open-source tool CloudSploit, which Aqua Security acquired in 2019. While the fact that CloudSploit has not been updated since August 2020 could lead to believe that Aqua Security is sunsetting it in favor of integrating its functionality into Trivy, the company has not disclosed any specifics about the relationship between the two tools.
Cloud security posture management helps organizations discover and remediate security risks, misuse, and misconfigurations in public clouds, with a specific focus on multi-cloud environments. Traced back to Gartner, CSPM is a moniker for a number of distinct approaches and practices to cloud security including risk assessment, incident response, compliance monitoring, configuration monitoring, and others.
