Top 10 Open-Source CSPM Tools for Data Security

Open-source cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools enable continuous monitoring, assessment, and management of your cloud environments, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

These tools leverage standardized frameworks, regulations, and policies to proactively identify and resolve misconfigurations and compliance breaches. They are integral to enhancing data security posture management (DSPM), enabling data discovery, maintaining data lineage, and improving data quality initiatives.

Based on their market presence, usability, and features here are the top 10 open-source CSPM examples:

Market presence

Tools are sorted based on GitHub stars in descending order.

*Full access to listed compliance checks might require additional license fees.

Compliance

*Accessing some tools’ full suite of compliance checks might require additional licensing fees. This is often because features such as extended rule sets, or continuous compliance monitoring fall under paid tiers.

Usability and deployment

• Dashboard: An intuitive dashboard allows users to access insights, reports, and analytics, along with graphs, charts, and customizable layouts. 
• Self-hosted version: A self-hosted version allows organizations to deploy the tool on their infrastructure rather than relying on a cloud provider. This is ideal for businesses that require greater control over their data.
• Docker plugin: A Docker plugin integrates the tool with Docker, enabling seamless deployment and operation within standardized containers contain libraries, system tools, code, and runtime. The plugin simplifies installation and updates, benefiting DevOps workflows and scalable architectures.

Coverage and connections

Accessing some tools’ full suite of cloud coverage might require additional licensing fees.

• Cloud coverage: Extensive cloud coverage ensures that security checks and configurations are compatible with multiple providers, making the tool versatile for multi-cloud strategies.
• Connectors: Connectors are integrations that enable the tool to interface with other systems, such as databases, APIs, or third-party software.

Configuration and customization

• Rules language: Rules language defines how compliance or policy rules are written and implemented in the tool. 
• YAML-based configuration: YAML is a human-readable data serialization language, meaning it’s easier for people to work with compared to other, more complex formats such as XML or JSON.

Read more: Cloud data security software.

Prowler

Prowler is claimed to run a scan in 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the size of the environment. It can also export its findings in several formats, including junit-xml, json, csv, html, and AWS security findings. After the scan Prowler provides an overview of the percentage of items that passed versus failed, the services scanned, and the number of vulnerabilities identified, based on the severity level.

Prowler is available as an open-source tool and a service called Prowler SaaS: 

• Prowler open-source: The open-source tool is available as a command line interface (CLI).
• Prowler SaaS: This service offers features like:
  • Synchronized processing to ensure that data and operations across multiple cloud environments (like different regions, cloud providers, or even development stages) are consistently updated and in sync with each other.
  • Dashboards with insights for all levels of security posture 
  • A view of infrastructure for any AWS region

Pricing: Prowler’s pricing is based on the size of the customer’s cloud environment, rather than per user. For the SaaS version, Prowler’s bills $0.001 per scanned resource per day. For smaller cloud users, Prowler is free if the bill is less than $12 per month. 

Kube-bench

Kube-bench is a tool that examines whether Kubernetes is deployed securely by running the checks documented in the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark. Tests are configured using YAML files, making it straightforward to update Kube-bench as test specifications change.

Steampipe

Steampipe offers zero-ETL security tools for directly accessing metadata from APIs and services, With Steampipe you can query cloud APIs, cloud, code, and logs from 500+ data sources. It also offers open-source benchmarks and dashboards to improve security and insights.

 Steampipe is available in various distributions:

• The Steampipe CLI connects APIs and services as relational databases, allowing you to examine dynamic data via SQL-based queries. The Steampipe CLI is a solution with its own PostgreSQL database and plugin administration.
• Steampipe Postgres FDWs are native Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers that convert APIs into foreign tables to enable access to your data from an external API directly within a database.
• Steampipe SQLite Extensions offer SQLite virtual tables that convert your queries into API calls to retrieve information from your API or service.

Steampipe’s extensible plugin format enables it to support a diverse set of source data, including:

• Cloud suppliers include Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Cloudflare, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.
• Cloud-based services include GitHub, Zoom, Okta, Slack, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
• Structured files include CSV, YML, and Terraform.
• Ad hoc investigation into network services such as DNS and HTTP. 

ScoutSuite

ScoutSuite is an open-source security auditing tool for cloud environments that evaluates their security posture. It collects configuration data, identifies security vulnerabilities, and highlights potential threats via cloud provider APIs.

ScoutSuite can be utilized offline once the data has been collected. ScoutSuite generated HTML reports including findings (e.g. access control policies, public IPs, etc) and cloud account configuration:

CloudQuery

CloudQuery helps establish a strong CSPM architecture by collecting and preparing data from your cloud providers, which is then stored in PostgreSQL, transformed with dbt (data build tool), and visualized with Grafana.  See a step-by-step methodology showing how CloudQuery helps CSPM:

1. ETL ingestion layer: CloudQuery – Gathers and preprocesses cloud resource data for further analysis.
2. Datastore layer PostgreSQL – A reliable relational database used to manage cloud data systematically.
3. Policy transformation layer: dbt (data build tool) – Executes data transformations to prepare datasets for analysis.
4. Data visualization layer: Grafana – A visualization tool for exploring and presenting cloud data insights.

See the AWS compliance dashboard of data collected with CloudQuery and visualized with Grafana :

Real-life example: Tempus, a business technology company, manages over 80 AWS accounts and 1000+ GCP projects and offers compliance monitoring, assurance, and cloud security posture management (CSPM).

CloudCustodian 

CloudCustodian allows you to manage your cloud resources by filtering, tagging, and performing actions with YAML. It can enforce security policies by natively integrating with the cloud provider’s control panel and remediating in real-time.

The solution can run locally, on any serverless application in AWS Lambda. With  CloudCustodian you can manage AWS, Azure, and GCP public cloud systems, with Kubernetes, Tencent Cloud, and OpenStack support in beta.

Cloudsploit

CloudSploit by Aqua is an open-source project for detecting and listing potential misconfigurations and security issues. It can collect data from cloud infrastructure accounts such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and GitHub. 

PacBot

Policy as Code Bot (PacBot) is a platform for continuous compliance monitoring, reporting, and cloud security automation.

PacBot implements security and compliance policies as code. PacBot evaluates any resources it discovers against these policies to determine policy compliance.

The PacBot auto-fix framework allows you to automatically respond to policy infractions by performing predetermined actions. 

PacBot key capabilities:

• Auto-fix for policy violations.
• Omni Search allows you to search all discovered resources.
• Self-Service Portal.
• Dynamic asset grouping for viewing compliance.
• Supports multiple AWS accounts.
• Role-based access control.

CloudGraph

CloudGraph is a free, open-source CSPM tool for AWS, Azure, GCP, and K8s. The hosted version includes a managed SaaS/self-hosted version of CloudGraph with built-in 3D visualization, automated scans, and additional compliance checks.

Key features include:

• Free compliance checks (Azure CIS 1.3.1, GCP CIS 1.2, etc).
• Full resource data, including links between resources, to help you comprehend context.
• Historical snapshots of your data across time
• A single endpoint to query your cloud data at once (e.g., retrieve AWS and GCP data in the same query).

For example, you can use the CloudGraph Policy Pack for AWS CIS 1.2 to query your CIS findings for all of your AWS accounts:

This query will return a JSON payload.

Additionally, you can integrate playgrounds such as GraphQL for engaging UX to query a GraphQL schema:

OpenCSPM 

When implemented into your environment, OpenCSPM can:

• Capture numerous cloud configuration data on a one-time or periodic basis from your cloud account resources (VMs, Clusters, IAM, etc.).
• Facilitate advanced querying, process, and load the data into a graph database.
• Customize policy checks to ensure compliance and record passing/failing resources regularly. 
• Notify when deviations from desired baselines occur to multiple destinations.

What is cloud security posture management (CSPM)?

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies and mitigates risk (e.g. GCP with public access) by automating visibility, continuous monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows to look for misconfigurations across various cloud environments/infrastructure, including:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Software as a Service (Saas)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Cloud misconfiguration occurs when a cloud system’s security architecture breaches a configuration policy.

CSPM provides insight across multi-cloud environments, allowing you to detect and correct configuration issues through automation swiftly. CSPMs monitor and mitigate risk across an organization’s whole cloud attack surface using: the

• Continuous monitoring
• Threat detection and prevention
• Remediation workflows

Then, workloads that do not match security criteria or known security risks are flagged and added to a prioritized list of issues.

• Security teams handling infrastructure in cloud environments aim to gain visibility into security risks throughout the account and track their resolution.
• Development and infrastructure teams are seeking a set of security best practices
• Red teams strive to develop focused situations tailored to their environment that have the greatest impact and benefit for their Blue Teams.
• Organizations seek to create a baseline of security vulnerabilities, prioritize them by risk, and track their resolution over time.

Further reading

External Links