01Introduction
Most cloud infrastructure is now defined in Terraform, CloudFormation or Pulumi. That means most cloud misconfigurations are written in a pull request before they exist in an account, which is the cheapest moment to catch them.
02What is IaC security?
Infrastructure as code (IaC) security is the practice of analyzing infrastructure templates for insecure settings, such as public storage, open security groups, missing encryption or broad IAM policies, before they are applied.
It is shift left security applied to infrastructure, and the preventive half of CSPM: posture tools find drift in running accounts, IaC scanning stops it at the source. Most CNAPP platforms include it.
03How IaC security works
IaC security plugs into the same workflow as application code.
- 1.
Parse
Read Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes manifests and Helm charts, resolving modules and variables.
- 2.
Evaluate
Check resources against policies from CIS Benchmarks, provider guidance and frameworks such as SOC 2.
- 3.
Gate
Comment on pull requests and block merges that introduce serious risk, part of DevSecOps.
- 4.
Reconcile
Compare templates with deployed state to catch changes made by hand in the console.
04Threats and risks
Templates scale mistakes as efficiently as they scale infrastructure.
Copied modules
One insecure module reused across dozens of environments.
Console drift
Hotfixes applied by hand that the next apply silently reverts, or that never make it back into code.
Context-free rules
A scanner flags every public bucket equally, whether it holds logos or customer exports.
Secrets in templates
Credentials hardcoded in variables or state files. See secrets detection.
05How Parameter helps
Parameter closes the loop between what is deployed and the code that defines it.
Findings from the live cloud
Cloud Security agents identify which misconfigurations form real attack paths in the running environment.
Fixed where they were written
Every finding ships as a Terraform pull request against your IaC repository, so the fix doesn't drift.
Code review coverage
Sentinel reviews application and infrastructure changes in the pull request itself.
