AWS CodeGuru Security: Proactive Protection for Your Code and Infrastructure

AWS CodeGuru Security: An Overview

AWS CodeGuru Security is a service designed to help developers identify and remediate security vulnerabilities in their code early in the development process. By leveraging machine learning and automated reasoning, CodeGuru Security analyzes your codebase, pinpointing common issues such as SQL injection, buffer overflows, and data leaks. It provides actionable recommendations to improve security, allowing teams to address potential threats before they become critical. This proactive approach not only enhances the security of applications but also streamlines the development process by integrating seamlessly with existing CI/CD pipelines.

Integrating AWS CodeGuru with AWS CodePipeline

Integrating AWS CodeGuru into your CI/CD pipeline ensures continuous code quality and security checks throughout the development process. By setting up CodeGuru Reviewer, you can automatically analyze pull requests and identify potential issues, such as inefficient code patterns and security vulnerabilities. During the build stage, CodeGuru runs its analysis, providing actionable feedback before code is merged or deployed. This automation helps enforce consistent coding standards and improves your application’s security posture. By continuously monitoring and integrating CodeGuru, you streamline the review process, reduce the risk of deploying flawed code, and enhance overall development efficiency.

The First Step to Integrate CodeGuru with AWS CodePipeline

1. In AWS console open the AWS CodeGuru service.
2. Once it is open, then from the left pane select the ‘Integrations’ option located under ‘Security’.
3. Then Click on the button ‘Integrate with AWS Code Pipeline’ (as shown below).
   
4. Then click on ‘Open template in CloudFormation’ button as shown below
   
5. Give name for the stack and click ‘Create stack’
6. This stack creates CodeBuildProject for CodeGuru that we need to use for checking our code within CodePipeline. These are the initial steps to make CodeGuru Security ready to scan our code within CodePipeline.
   

Using CodeGuru CodeBuildProject within AWS CodePipeline

Now follow these steps to add CodeGuru Security in your Pipeline:

• Visit the AWS CodePipeline console page
• Select the pipeline you want to run CodeGuru Security scans on
• Choose Edit
• Choose Add stageand enter a stage name
• For the stage you just created, choose Add action group
• For Action provider, choose CodeBuild
• For Input artifacts, choose SourceArtifact
• For Project name, choose CodeGuruSecurity
• Choose Done
• Choose Save

After completing the steps, CodeGuru Security will automatically scan each pipeline deployment.

Given below is the CodePipeline with ‘S3’ at a source stage, CodeGuru CodeBuildProject at Build stage and CloudFormation at Deploy stage. When any CloudFormation template is uploaded in the source S3 bucket, the CodeGuru Security will scan that code for vulnerability check and these results can be seen from the CodeGuru console using the ‘Scans’ option from left side menu.

Within the Scan option you can see all scans done on code deployed through this Pipeline (as shown below).

CodeGuru Security Scan Results

Below are the scan results of CodeGuru Security for a CloudFormation template in yaml format uploaded in S3 to deploy an infrastructure.

If we open any finding displayed in the scan result, it gives us the overview of that finding and the suggested remediation as shown below. (I have selected the 3^rd finding of CIDRIP Property is set to 0.0.0.0/0)

Conclusion

AWS CodeGuru Security provides automated code reviews that help detect and fix vulnerabilities early in the development process. Integrating it into your AWS CodePipeline ensures continuous security monitoring, reducing the risk of issues in your codebase. This proactive approach improves both code quality and development efficiency. Adopting AWS CodeGuru Security is a smart step towards building secure, reliable software and infrastructure.

References

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codeguru/latest/security-ug/what-is-codeguru-security.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codeguru/latest/security-ug/scan-types.html#security-analysis

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