checkov VS trivy

Checkov Owner/Maintainer: Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks (acquired in 2021) Age: First released on GitHub on March 31st, 2021 License: Apache License 2.0

‍Checkov is another great tool that examines your Terraform files (.tf), parsing the configurations and evaluating them against a comprehensive set of predefined policies. It scans Terraform-managed infrastructure and detects misconfigurations that could lead to security issues or non-compliance with best practices and regulations.

Bridgecrew — Infrastructure as code (IaC) security powered by the open source tool - Checkov. The core Bridgecrew platform is free for up to 50 IaC resources.

Kustomize: It provides a solution to customize the Kubernetes resource base configuration and differential configuration without template and DSL. It does not solve the constraint problem itself, but needs to cooperate with a large number of additional tools to check constraints, such as Kube-linter, Checkov and kubescape.

Checkov is a versatile static code analysis tool designed for infrastructure as code (IaC) and software composition analysis (SCA). It supports a wide range of technologies, including Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Docker, and others, to detect security and compliance issues through graph-based scanning. Checkov also performs SCA scans, identifying vulnerabilities in open source packages and images by checking for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). Additionally, it is integrated into Prisma Cloud Application Security, a platform that helps developers secure cloud resources and infrastructure-as-code files, enabling the identification, rectification, and prevention of misconfigurations throughout the development lifecycle.

For your Dockerfiles, you can also scan them. There are lots of tools that can check your Dockerfiles. They will validate if Dockerfile is compliant with Docker best practices such as not using root user, making sure a health check exists, and not exposing the SSH port. You can use Snyk and Checkov.

You could try https://www.checkov.io/

We use https://www.checkov.io/ for this, it's very simple to get started with and works really well as PR quality gate

Once there is a CI pipeline for delivering infra changes you can add static code analysis tools (checkov) and even start testing changes (terratest)

I just had a brief chat with one of the developers of Checkov and it sounds nice (and open source). I haven't had a chance to play with it, but if you want to it's at https://www.checkov.io/

Trivy Owner/Maintainer: Aqua Security Age: First released on GitHub on May 7th, 2019 License: Apache License 2.0 backward-compatible with tfsec

Trivy. A Simple and Comprehensive Vulnerability Scanner for Containers.

Using Trivy:

Trivy is a mature and comprehensive open source tool from Aqua Security that supports scanning multiple sources, from file systems to containers and VMs. Trivy also looks beyond vulnerabilities, to scan licenses, secrets, infrastructure as code misconfiguration, and more.

I would suggest to think about the thread model that you are facing so you can have a better mental model of the weak points of your environment. The very very big majority of these attacks will be automated probing for publicly known vulnerabilities or default credentials. That means the maintainers of the software you are running and the channels on which their updates are shipped to you and deployed are very important factors. For software that is not installed from a trusted and well maintained source (e.g. Ubuntus main repository), you want to make extra sure that vulnerabilities are updated. E.g. your deployed docker containers might contain security issues, you can run checks on these with tools like trivy. The same is also true for appliances, in case your router or firewall contains a software vulnerability, how will you be notified and how will the required updates be deployed?