Keep reading for a breakdown of what vulnerability scanning means, how it works, and how to get started scanning for vulnerabilities with Aqua.
In this article:
- What is vulnerability scanning and why is it important?
- How does vulnerability scanning work?
- What is cloud vulnerability scanning?
- Vulnerability scanning in AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Scanning for vulnerabilities with Aqua
- Vulnerability scanning as a pillar of security
What is vulnerability scanning and why is it important?
Vulnerability scanning is the process of checking software for vulnerabilities, meaning security flaws or weaknesses. It’s a critical component in the vulnerability management process.
Vulnerability scanning can reveal a range of vulnerability types, such as:
- Coding flaws that threat actors could use to launch arbitrary code execution attacks.
- Prompt injection vulnerabilities, which allow attackers to manipulate application behavior through malicious input.
- Misconfigurations that may give malicious parties access to resources they should not be able to view.
- The exposure of secret information, such as passwords, in plain text.
Using vulnerability management tools to detect risks like these is important because avoiding these risks entirely is virtually impossible. No matter how carefully developers write code or how skilled they are, there is also a chance that security flaws will find their way into applications. This means you should never assume that software is free of vulnerabilities, regardless of who wrote it or how much experience they have in developing secure code.
Indeed, more than 25,000 new vulnerabilities were reported in 2023 – and those are just the ones registered publicly. (Additional vulnerabilities can exist that are never disclosed in a public database.) On average, more than 10 percent of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities are considered “critical,” meaning threat actors can exploit them to cause serious harm.
To complicate matters further, vulnerabilities are often not obvious by simply looking at application code. For example, buffer overflows (a type of arbitrary code execution attack) typically happen because of the way an application manages memory. But by looking at source code, even a skilled developer might struggle to know exactly how the application interacts with system memory or whether a vulnerability of this type exists.
Both of these factors – the impossibility of avoiding vulnerabilities when creating software, and the difficulty of detecting vulnerabilities through manual vulnerability assessment – make it crucial to scan for vulnerabilities automatically prior to deploying software.
How does vulnerability scanning work?
Vulnerability scanning works by automatically parsing the contents of software to look for signs of vulnerabilities.
This can include analyzing an application’s source code, binaries and/or dependencies to detect risks. For example, by scanning an application’s source code, teams may discover poorly written code that creates risks such as arbitrary code execution or code injection. Analyzing binary code (meaning application code that has been compiled) can reveal signatures associated with malware or known vulnerabilities.
And scanning application dependencies (meaning packages or modules that are not part of an app itself, but are required to be present in the app’s runtime environment) can identify problems like vulnerable open source components, which threat actors could exploit to compromise an application or its host system.
While you could theoretically detect some vulnerabilities manually, the difficulty of identifying potential vulnerabilities, combined with the vast number of vulnerabilities in existence today, means that automated vulnerability scanning is the only way to maximize security coverage.
What is cloud vulnerability scanning?
Given that many applications today are developed and/or deployed in the cloud, cloud vulnerability scanning has become an important component of vulnerability scanning. Cloud vulnerability scanning means checking cloud-based applications for security flaws.
In addition, cloud vulnerability scanning can in some cases help to uncover security risks in cloud infrastructure itself – meaning the cloud environments that host cloud-based applications. This is important because even the world’s largest public cloud platforms can be subject to security vulnerabilities, so scanning cloud environments for risks is just as important as scanning cloud applications.
Vulnerability scanning in AWS, GCP, and Azure
If you use a major public cloud – such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure – one way to scan for vulnerabilities is to use tools built into these platforms. For AWS scanning, you can leverage a vulnerability scanner called Inspector, which is built into AWS. GCP has a Web Security Scanner. Azure Security also supports some vulnerability scanning needs.
The main advantage of using tools like these is that they are easy to deploy because they are built into cloud environments – so you don’t have to do anything to install them. You just turn them on.
On the other hand, cloud vulnerability scanners offered by AWS, GCP, and Azure don’t typically work in other environments, so they are not an ideal solution if you need to scan for vulnerabilities across many platforms. In addition, these tools don’t always scan at the same level of depth as third-party vulnerability scanners, and their vulnerability reporting features may be limited.
Scanning for vulnerabilities with Aqua
As an alternative to the cloud vulnerability scanners mentioned above, you can use Aqua to scan for vulnerabilities in any environment. In addition to checking for a wide range of vulnerability types – including not just coding flaws but also configuration risks – Aqua automatically prioritizes vulnerabilities based on risk level, and it draws on a range of vulnerability data to maximize the accuracy of results.
Vulnerability scanning with Aqua is simple. You can integrate Aqua into your CI/CD pipeline to enable automated, comprehensive scanning. You can also perform simple one-off vulnerability scans using Trivy, an open source vulnerability scanner from Aqua.
To set up Trivy, simply download and install the tool from a package repository. For example, you can install Trivy on Ubuntu with:
sudo snap install trivy
To run a scan, just specify the name of the image you want to scan. For instance, to scan the MySQL container image, you’d run:
trivy image mysql
Trivy will generate a detailed vulnerability report like the following:
Vulnerability scanning as a pillar of security
Scanning for vulnerabilities is one of the most basic and critical steps organizations can take to protect themselves against attack. Aqua’s vulnerability scanning capabilities make it easy to check for vulnerabilities no matter which types of apps you run or where you deploy them.
