Beyond compute: Shifting vulnerability detection left with Amazon Inspector code security capabilities

Since launch, Amazon Inspector has helped customers automate vulnerability management for their running workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), container workloads, and AWS Lambda functions. Today, we’re taking a step forward into more proactive security with the latest addition to Amazon Inspector: code security capabilities. By using this powerful new feature you can get a proactive view of the security health of your code. With native integration to source code managers (SCM) such as GitHub and GitLab, Amazon Inspector helps you identify and prioritize security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across your application source-code, dependencies, and infrastructure as code (IaC).

Even if you make no changes to your code, there can be vulnerabilities in libraries that it depends on, creating risks for you and your users. By scanning repositories, you can continually monitor the security of your code and its dependencies. With Amazon Inspector, you can define consistent security controls throughout your software development lifecycle, so your security and development teams can collaborate effectively while reducing risk and remediation costs.

Overview of Amazon Inspector code security capabilities

Amazon Inspector now provides three additional security analysis capabilities: static application security testing (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and infrastructure as code (IaC) scanning. To use these features, you must establish a connection with your SCM tool (as shown in Figure 1). If you use GitHub, you can get started by installing and configuring the Amazon Inspector App from the GitHub Marketplace, which enables automated code analysis and delivers security findings directly within pull requests. If you use a self-managed GitLab, implementation is straightforward using a personal access token with the necessary permissions.

Figure 1: Code security landing page for Amazon Inspector

Static application security testing

Static application security testing (SAST) is the process of analyzing source code to identify insecure patterns or methods without needing to compile or execute the code. Amazon Inspector SAST scans analyze your source code to identify potential security vulnerabilities such as hardcoded secrets, cross-site scripting, or injection attacks across a wide range of programming languages including, JavaScript, Python, C#. The service also analyzes Bash shell scripts, extending security coverage beyond application code to include deployment and configuration scripts.

Software composition analysis

Software composition analysis (SCA) helps you understand and manage risks related to software dependencies. Every programming language has its own method of finding, importing, and updating contributed libraries. For example, PyPI for Python, NPM for NodeJS, and Cargo for Rust. Sometimes vulnerabilities are discovered in libraries distributed through the language-specific package distributions, or sometimes a library that you’re using depends on another library, and that dependency has the vulnerability. Amazon Inspector supports the major environments for Python, .Net, PHP, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, Rust, and Go. It automatically analyzes dependencies to identify known vulnerabilities and show you which code is affected. When vulnerabilities are detected, Amazon Inspector provides detailed information about the impact, available fixes, and upgrade paths to help you quickly remediate issues.

Infrastructure as code security

Just as applications are constructed from code, cloud infrastructure can be deployed and managed through code-based methods. Amazon Inspector now also analyzes IaC templates (as shown in Figure 2) to identify potential security misconfigurations, for example, the use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) wildcards in action statements or disabled Glue Data Catalog encryption. This way identified risks can be fixed before the code is executed and the incorrect infrastructure is deployed. The new feature analyzes AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, and AWS CDK, helping you maintain secure infrastructure definitions throughout their development process. This capability helps make sure that security best practices are followed, and potential issues are caught before the infrastructure is deployed.

Figure 2: Amazon Inspector scan analysis configuration showing SAST, IaC, and SCA scan types

For the most up-to-date list of programming languages supported across Amazon Inspector code security capabilities, see the online documentation.

Improved security governance and visibility

Amazon Inspector lets you choose which scan types to run across which repositories (as shown in Figure 3). You can initiate a scan based on any of the following:

• On-demand: Initiates an immediate scan of the selected repository
• Change based: Initiates a scan on push to main branch, or on a pull request or merge request
• Scheduled: Initiates a scan weekly or monthly

Figure 3: Overview of scan configurations

Amazon Inspector integrates code security findings into a unified dashboard that you can use to manage and enforce scanning policies across repositories using customizable scan configurations. As part of the integration workflow with the SCM platform, you can set up a default scan configuration that can be applied to existing or new repositories. Alternatively, you also have an option to create custom scan configurations that match specific existing repositories through inclusions tags.

Upon successful scheduled or event-based scans, Amazon Inspector generates detailed findings that pinpoint specific lines of code within repositories, including commit IDs and file locations where vulnerabilities are detected. Amazon Inspector empowers your security teams with customizable filtering through intelligent suppression rules. By using these options, you can tailor your security view to match your organization’s unique priorities, showing exactly what matters most to your team while preserving findings data for reporting and auditing. Through native Amazon EventBridge integration, these detailed security findings can be automatically routed into existing security workflows, enabling alerting and response capabilities.

Code fix recommendations

Amazon Inspector streamlines security remediation by providing specific code fix recommendations directly where developers work. The two-way integration with your SCM automatically suggests fixes as comments within pull requests (PRs) and merge requests (MRs) for Critical and High findings, alerting developers to the most important vulnerabilities to address without disrupting their workflow. Simultaneously, security teams benefit from a consolidated dashboard in the Amazon Inspector console that aggregates findings from scheduled or event-based scans across in-scope repositories. Each finding comes with tailored remediation guidance based on scan type (as shown in Figure 4): specific code suggestions for IAC and SAST findings, or recommended version upgrades and dependency update paths for SCA findings.

Figure 4: Code fix recommendation on a finding in the Amazon Inspector dashboard

Conclusion

These expanded security capabilities now deliver end-to-end visibility of the security health of your cloud applications, from initial code development through to production deployment. Security teams can use the unified dashboard in Amazon Inspector to track and manage vulnerabilities across repositories and application components, facilitating consistent security controls throughout the software lifecycle. Meanwhile, development teams receive immediate, actionable feedback within their source code repositories, creating a seamless security experience that bridges both security and development workflows. This approach is designed to help you maintain robust security practices while keeping development velocity high.

To get started with the new capabilities of Amazon Inspector, visit the Amazon Inspector console. For pricing details and implementation guidance, see documentation. These new features are now available in 10 AWS commercial Regions.