OPAL VS checkov

Another tool that can help you deploy a Policy as Code-based solution in 2024 is OPAL, the Open Policy Administration Layer. OPAL is an open-source project that provides a comprehensive policy-based service for applications. With one click, you can deploy a full architecture of a Git-based centralized policy store with decentralized policy engines running as a sidecar with your applications. OPAL also provides a unified architecture to sync all the data you need with the policy engines.

Inspired by Braden’s post, this blog explores the journey of Reddit's team, focusing on their strategic decisions, the challenges they encountered, and the innovative solutions they crafted. Alongside Reddit's in-house efforts, we also examine OPAL, an open-source solution that aligns with the functionality of Reddit’s system, presenting an alternative approach for organizations seeking sophisticated authorization management solutions in the field of Ad Tech.

We reviewed how Netlfix used OPA with a a replication pattern; and decided to create a similar yet more extensible and event-driven solution - and so OPAL (Open Policy Administration Layer) was born - creating a scalable, zero-trust way to manage policy engines and their policy/data at scale.

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We are considering connecting this provider to our open-source tool OPAL. Are you using OPAL? Do you think such integration would be beneficial?

One example of such an administration tool is OPAL, an open policy administration layer that works with OPA. OPAL tracks changes in external services and propagates the data to the OPA PDPs so the authorization requests can handle existing data and return faster results.

Building permissions and authorization can be a complex endeavor, but adhering to the best practices outlined in this article can lead to more robust and maintainable applications. It's vital to avoid the mentioned anti-patterns, adopt a declarative approach, and ensure that your authorization system is agnostic, generic, decoupled, unified, and easily auditable. By centralizing your authorization policies and leveraging open-source tools or cloud services like OPAL and Permit.io, you can streamline the implementation and management of your authorization system.

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/