Infrastructure as Code Security Scanning
Scan Terraform, CloudFormation, and Helm charts with IaC security tools (Checkov, tfsec) to catch misconfigurations before they reach production.
Infrastructure as Code Security Overview
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, and Helm allow infrastructure to be defined in version-controlled configuration files. This brings enormous benefits — repeatability, auditability, and automation — but also a critical security risk: misconfigurations in IaC files produce insecure infrastructure at scale. A single misconfigured Terraform module deployed across 50 environments creates 50 vulnerable systems simultaneously. IaC security scanning addresses this by checking configuration files before they are applied, shifting security left into the developer workflow.
Common IaC Misconfigurations
Security scanning tools look for the most common IaC misconfigurations found in real-world cloud environments: S3 buckets with public access enabled or no encryption at rest; security groups with 0.0.0.0/0 inbound rules on sensitive ports (22, 3389, 1433); databases without encryption or with public accessibility; IAM policies with * resource or action wildcards; CloudTrail disabled in a region; KMS keys without key rotation; and load balancers with HTTP listeners instead of HTTPS. These findings closely mirror the checks performed by cloud security benchmarks like CIS AWS Foundations.
# Dangerous Terraform: public S3 bucket + no encryption
resource 'aws_s3_bucket' 'data' {
bucket = 'my-data-bucket'
# Missing: server_side_encryption_configuration
# Missing: aws_s3_bucket_public_access_block
}All lessons in this course
- Container Security: Image Hardening and Runtime Protection
- Kubernetes Security: RBAC, Network Policies, and Pod Security
- Serverless and Function Security
- Infrastructure as Code Security Scanning