Comprehensive IaC Security for Security
and Development Teams.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) security ensures that configurations written as code are secure, compliant, and free from misconfigurations before deployment. By embedding security directly into developer workflows, teams can prevent security risks without slowing down development.

Cycode provides comprehensive IaC security, unifying scanning, prioritization, and remediation to secure configuration files across the entire development lifecycle. This ensures you can scale your cloud infrastructure securely without introducing risk.

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Misconfigurations in IaC security can lead to:

• Security breaches
• Compliance failures
• Operational disruptions

Because IaC automates infrastructure deployment, vulnerabilities can scale rapidly if not caught early. Following best practices for securing IaC helps teams shift security left, reducing risks before they impact production.

IaC security is foundational to modern DevSecOps, allowing organizations to shift left and proactively manage risk. By integrating security into development workflows, IaC security provides several core benefits that significantly improve your organization's overall security posture and accelerate delivery:

• Early risk detection: Catches misconfigurations before deployment.
• Automated compliance: Enforces security policies within development pipelines.
• Faster remediation: Fixes vulnerabilities in code before they reach production.
• Scalability: Ensures security across cloud and production environments as they evolve.
• Efficiency: Reduces manual security reviews through automation.

IaC scanning automates the detection of misconfigurations, compliance violations, and exposed secrets in infrastructure code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes). By embedding IaC security into developer workflows, teams can seamlessly integrate security into CI/CD pipelines, catching and fixing security issues before deployment.

When selecting an IaC security tool for your enterprise, the core focus should be on consolidation, context, and developer experience. Avoid standalone scanners and prioritize a solution that offers the following:

1. Unified Platform and Context
   
   
   • ASPM Integration: Choose a platform that unifies IaC scanning with other security findings (SAST, SCA, Secrets). The solution should be part of a complete Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform, not a point solution.
   • Code-to-Cloud Traceability: The tool must use a Risk Intelligence Graph to correlate misconfigurations in the IaC file with the actual running cloud environment. This is essential for accurate, risk-based prioritization


2. Priority and Remediation at Scale
   
   
   • Contextual Prioritization: The tool must move beyond simple severity scores to prioritize findings based on real-world business risk (e.g., is the vulnerable resource exposed to the internet?).
   • Developer-First Workflows: Look for deep integration into developer tools (IDE, PRs, CI/CD) that provides fast feedback and offers automated remediation or code fixes directly within the workflow to ensure high velocity.


3. Compliance and Governance
   
   
   • Broad IaC Support: Ensure the tool supports all your frameworks (Terraform, Kubernetes, CloudFormation) and can enforce your security and compliance policies (e.g., CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2) as code across your organization.

IaC security works by embedding security checks into development pipelines. It includes:

1. Automated scanning: Identifies misconfigurations in IaC files.
2. Policy enforcement: Ensures compliance with security standards (CIS, NIST, etc.).
3. Secret detection: Prevents credential leaks in code.
4. Drift detection: Monitors infrastructure for unauthorized changes.
5. Remediation automation: Fixes issues before deployment without manual effort.

For comprehensive security, IaC security should be integrated with other security layers, such as SAST and CI/CD security. ASPM platforms like Cycode Complete ASPM unify these functions, providing end-to-end security visibility across the entire SDLC.

Enterprise IaC security is the crucial link between development and the cloud, ensuring security is baked into the foundation of your applications, not bolted on later. It secures the specifications for your cloud environments (the "E" in DevSecOps), rather than just the application code.

The three primary ways IaC security integrates into a broader AppSec strategy are:

1. Enabling Shift Left Security: IaC security is the purest form of shift left security. By utilizing automated IaC scanners early in the development process (e.g., within the developer’s IDE or on every Git pull request), security teams catch misconfigurations and vulnerabilities before they are provisioned into the actual cloud infrastructure. This drastically reduces the cost and effort of remediation.
2. Governing the Software Supply Chain: It provides a critical control point across the entire supply chain. Implementing a robust IaC security framework ensures all infrastructure configurations—whether Terraform, Kubernetes, or CloudFormation—adhere to corporate policy and compliance standards (like CIS or PCI DSS) from the moment the code is written
3. Providing Risk Context: IaC security data is fed into a central Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform to provide Code-to-Cloud traceability. This context is vital for prioritization, allowing security teams to understand which IaC risks translate to actual, exploitable vulnerabilities in production.

Yes, Cycode’s IaC security tools integrate seamlessly with virtually any CI/CD pipeline through a combination of native integrations, APIs, and CLI tools.

Cycode is built as a unified Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform, making deep integration a core necessity. Its primary goal is to shift IaC security left by becoming a mandatory guardrail within the CI/CD workflow. This integration ensures that security checks are automated before provisioning and management occur, including:

• Native Integrations: Cycode connects directly with popular CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, and others.
• Workflow Enforcement: It automatically scans pull requests for IaC misconfigurations (in Terraform, Kubernetes, etc.) and can block the pipeline from executing a deployment until critical issues are remediated.
• Real-time Feedback: Integration delivers security findings and suggested auto-fixes directly back to the developer within their familiar CI/CD environment, preventing insecure infrastructure from ever reaching production.

Cycode effectively detects and manages exposed secrets in IaC templates through a unified, automated process designed for the entire software development lifecycle:

Detection and Prevention

Cycode uses an advanced IaC scanning tool and a specialized secrets detection engine that continuously scans IaC files (Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, etc.) for patterns indicative of sensitive information—like API keys, passwords, and tokens.

• Shift-Left Enforcement: Scans are automatically triggered on every commit and Pull Request (PR), blocking the secrets from ever being merged into the main codebase or deployed into the cloud.

Context and Management

Cycode doesn't just find secrets; it prioritizes and helps automate their remediation.

• Risk Prioritization: The platform applies context to the exposed secret (e.g., what services can it access?) to provide a risk score, ensuring security teams focus on the most exploitable and high-impact exposures first.
• Developer-First Fixes: When a secret is found, Cycode provides automated remediation suggestions or generates a clean PR with the necessary fix, reducing the Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) by allowing developers to resolve the issue directly within their existing workflow.

Yes, Cycode fully supports real-time developer feedback during Pull Requests (PRs) and local commits, making "Shift Left" an automated reality. This capability is fundamental to Cycode's developer-first approach.

Here is how real-time feedback is delivered:

1. In-Workflow Feedback for Pull Requests (PRs)

Cycode integrates directly into Source Code Management (SCM) platforms (like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket) to provide instantaneous feedback on code changes:

• Automated PR Comments: On every PR, Cycode automatically scans the code changes (diff) for secrets, IaC misconfigurations, and other security issues. Findings are displayed as inline comments within the PR interface, pointing directly to the vulnerable line of code.
• Security Status Checks: The platform updates the PR's security status check (often showing a "failed" status if a high-severity issue is found), enabling automated branch protection rules to block the merge before the insecure code is accepted.
• AI-Driven Remediation: In many cases, the feedback includes AI-suggested code fixes that developers can apply directly within the PR or their IDE, accelerating the time-to-remediate (MTTR) without requiring security team intervention

2. Local Feedback via IDE and CLI

To catch issues even earlier, before the code is pushed to a remote repository:

• Pre-Commit Hooks: Developers can configure the Cycode CLI to run scans as pre-commit hooks. This instantly blocks a local commit if hardcoded secrets or critical misconfigurations are detected, ensuring the issue is fixed while the code is still on the developer's machine.
• IDE Plugins: Cycode offers plugins for popular Integrated Development Environments (VS Code, JetBrains), providing real-time, in-line security analysis and context directly as the developer types the code.