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.

As an initial starting point for the CLI, we chose 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.

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

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

In its current release, it scans Docker images and its contents. In particular, it searches for known configuration files of different software packages (like webservers, databases, etc.), and scans these configurations for security and best practice.

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

sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip

apk add python3 py3-pip

sudo yum install -y python3 python3-pip

sudo pacman -S python python-pip

brew install python3

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

pip3 install coguard-cli

Keep in mind that it is a requirement to have Docker installed locally.

After installing the CoGuard CLI, you can run a scan on your local images using

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

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>]

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

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

This step 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.

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 benchmarks, such as CIS, 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.

The currently supported auto-discovery of configuration files inside Docker containers is limited to the finders in this folder. The list includes, among others,

• Apache Kafka
• Apache Tomcat
• Apache WebServer
• ElasticSearch
• Kerberos
• MongoDB
• MySQL
• NGINX
• OpenTelemetry Collector
• PostgreSQL

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.

• CoGuard Website
• CoGuard Blog