Static Application Security Testing with GitLab CI/CD
NOTE: Note: In order to use this tool, a GitLab Ultimate license is needed.
This example shows how to run Static Application Security Testing (SAST) on your project's source code by using GitLab CI/CD.
First, you need GitLab Runner with docker-in-docker executor.
You can then add a new job to .gitlab-ci.yml
, called sast
:
sast:
image: docker:latest
variables:
DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2
allow_failure: true
services:
- docker:dind
script:
- export SAST_VERSION=$(echo "$CI_SERVER_VERSION" | sed 's/^\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\).*/\1-\2-stable/')
- docker run
--env SAST_CONFIDENCE_LEVEL="${SAST_CONFIDENCE_LEVEL:-3}"
--env SAST_DISABLE_REMOTE_CHECKS="${SAST_DISABLE_REMOTE_CHECKS:-false}"
--volume "$PWD:/code"
--volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
"registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/security-products/sast:$SAST_VERSION" /app/bin/run /code
artifacts:
paths: [gl-sast-report.json]
The above example will create a sast
job in the test
stage and will create the required report artifact. Check the
Auto-DevOps template
for a full reference.
The results are sorted by the priority of the vulnerability:
- High
- Medium
- Low
- Unknown
- Everything else
Behind the scenes, the GitLab SAST Docker image is used to detect the languages/frameworks and in turn runs the matching scan tools.
Some security scanners require to send a list of project dependencies to GitLab central servers to check for vulnerabilities. To learn more about this or to disable it, check the GitLab SAST tool documentation.
TIP: Tip:
Starting with GitLab Ultimate 10.3, this information will
be automatically extracted and shown right in the merge request widget. To do
so, the CI job must be named sast
and the artifact path must be
gl-sast-report.json
. Make sure your pipeline has a stage nammed test
, or specify another existing stage inside the sast
job.
Learn more on application security testing results shown in merge requests.