Infrastructure as Code Security
Cloud SecurityDefinition
The practice of scanning, validating, and securing infrastructure definition files — Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, Pulumi — for misconfigurations, hardcoded secrets, and policy violations before deployment.
Technical Details
IaC security integrates 'shift-left' scanning into development workflows, catching misconfigurations (overly permissive S3 buckets, public RDS instances, missing encryption) before they reach production. Tools include Checkov, Terrascan, KICS, and tfsec, which check IaC files against CIS benchmarks and cloud security best practices. Secrets scanning tools (Gitleaks, truffleHog) detect hardcoded credentials in IaC repositories.
Practical Usage
DevSecOps teams integrate IaC scanning into pre-commit hooks and CI pipelines so misconfigurations fail builds before deployment. Policy-as-code frameworks (OPA/Rego, Sentinel) allow security teams to define and enforce organizational guardrails consistently across all cloud deployments.
Examples
- A Terraform plan scan catches an AWS security group allowing 0.0.0.0/0 on port 22 before the PR is merged.
- Checkov detects an Azure storage account in Bicep configured without encryption at rest, blocking the deployment pipeline.
- A secrets scanner finds a hardcoded AWS access key in a Terraform module committed to a public GitHub repository.