- Description
- Features
- Requirements and Installation
- Usage
- Screenshots
- Advanced Usage
- Security Hub integration
- CodeBuild deployment
- Whitelist/allowlist or remove FAIL from resources
- Fix
- Troubleshooting
- Extras
- Forensics Ready Checks
- GDPR Checks
- HIPAA Checks
- Trust Boundaries Checks
- Multi Account and Continuous Monitoring
- Add Custom Checks
- Third Party Integrations
- Full list of checks and groups
- License
Prowler is a command line tool for AWS Security Best Practices Assessment, Auditing, Hardening and Forensics Readiness Tool.
It follows guidelines of the CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark (49 checks) and has more than 100 additional checks including related to GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO-27001, FFIEC, SOC2 and others.
Read more about CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark v1.2.0 - 05-23-2018
+150 checks covering security best practices across all AWS regions and most of AWS services and related to the next groups:
- Identity and Access Management [group1]
- Logging [group2]
- Monitoring [group3]
- Networking [group4]
- CIS Level 1 [cislevel1]
- CIS Level 2 [cislevel2]
- Extras see Extras section [extras]
- Forensics related group of checks [forensics-ready]
- GDPR [gdpr] Read more here
- HIPAA [hipaa] Read more here
- Trust Boundaries [trustboundaries] Read more here
- Secrets
- PCI-DSS
- ISO-27001
- Internet exposed resources
- EKS-CIS
- FFIEC
- SOC2
- ENS (Esquema Nacional de Seguridad of Spain)
With Prowler you can:
- get a direct colorful or monochrome report
- a HTML, CSV, JUNIT, JSON or JSON ASFF format report
- send findings directly to Security Hub
- run specific checks and groups or create your own
- check multiple AWS accounts in parallel or sequentially
- and more! Read examples below
Prowler has been written in bash using AWS-CLI and it works in Linux and OSX.
-
Make sure the latest version of AWS-CLI is installed on your workstation (it works with either v1 or v2), and other components needed, with Python pip already installed:
pip install awscli detect-secrets
AWS-CLI can be also installed it using "brew", "apt", "yum" or manually from https://aws.amazon.com/cli/, but
detect-secrets
has to be installed usingpip
. You will need to installjq
to get the most from Prowler. -
Make sure jq is installed (example below with "apt" but use a valid package manager for your OS):
sudo apt install jq
-
Previous steps, from your workstation:
git clone https://github.com/toniblyx/prowler cd prowler
-
Since Prowler users AWS CLI under the hood, you can follow any authentication method as described here. Make sure you have properly configured your AWS-CLI with a valid Access Key and Region or declare AWS variables properly (or intance profile):
aws configure
or
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="ASXXXXXXX" export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="XXXXXXXXX" export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN="XXXXXXXXX"
-
Those credentials must be associated to a user or role with proper permissions to do all checks. To make sure, add the AWS managed policies, SecurityAudit and ViewOnlyAccess, to the user or role being used. Policy ARNs are:
arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/SecurityAudit arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/job-function/ViewOnlyAccess
Additional permissions needed: to make sure Prowler can scan all services included in the group Extras, make sure you attach also the custom policy prowler-additions-policy.json to the role you are using. If you want Prowler to send findings to AWS Security Hub, make sure you also attach the custom policy prowler-security-hub.json.
-
Run the
prowler
command without options (it will use your environment variable credentials if they exist or will default to using the~/.aws/credentials
file and run checks over all regions when needed. The default region is us-east-1):./prowler
Use
-l
to list all available checks and the groups (sections) that reference them. To list all groups use-L
and to list content of a group use-l -g <groupname>
.If you want to avoid installing dependencies run it using Docker:
docker run -ti --rm --name prowler --env AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID --env AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY --env AWS_SESSION_TOKEN toniblyx/prowler:latest
-
For custom AWS-CLI profile and region, use the following: (it will use your custom profile and run checks over all regions when needed):
./prowler -p custom-profile -r us-east-1
-
For a single check use option
-c
:./prowler -c check310
With Docker:
docker run -ti --rm --name prowler --env AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID --env AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY --env AWS_SESSION_TOKEN toniblyx/prowler:latest "-c check310"
or multiple checks separated by comma:
./prowler -c check310,check722
or all checks but some of them:
./prowler -E check42,check43
or for custom profile and region:
./prowler -p custom-profile -r us-east-1 -c check11
or for a group of checks use group name:
./prowler -g group1 # for iam related checks
or exclude some checks in the group:
./prowler -g group4 -E check42,check43
Valid check numbers are based on the AWS CIS Benchmark guide, so 1.1 is check11 and 3.10 is check310
-
If you want to save your report for later analysis thare are different ways, natively (supported text, mono, csv, json, json-asff, junit-xml and html, see note below for more info):
./prowler -M csv
or with multiple formats at the same time:
./prowler -M csv,json,json-asff,html
or just a group of checks in multiple formats:
./prowler -g gdpr -M csv,json,json-asff
or if you want a sorted and dynamic HTML report do:
./prowler -M html
Now
-M
creates a file inside the prowleroutput
directory namedprowler-output-AWSACCOUNTID-YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.format
. You don't have to specify anything else, no pipes, no redirects.or just saving the output to a file like below:
./prowler -M mono > prowler-report.txt
To generate JUnit report files, include the junit-xml format. This can be combined with any other format. Files are written inside a prowler root directory named
junit-reports
:./prowler -M text,junit-xml
Note about output formats to use with
-M
: "text" is the default one with colors, "mono" is like default one but monochrome, "csv" is comma separated values, "json" plain basic json (without comma between lines) and "json-asff" is also json with Amazon Security Finding Format that you can ship to Security Hub using-S
.or save your report in an S3 bucket (this only works for text or mono. For csv, json or json-asff it has to be copied afterwards):
./prowler -M mono | aws s3 cp - s3://bucket-name/prowler-report.txt
When generating multiple formats and running using Docker, to retrieve the reports, bind a local directory to the container, e.g.:
docker run -ti --rm --name prowler --volume "$(pwd)":/prowler/output --env AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID --env AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY --env AWS_SESSION_TOKEN toniblyx/prowler:latest -M csv,json
-
To perform an assessment based on CIS Profile Definitions you can use cislevel1 or cislevel2 with
-g
flag, more information about this here, page 8:./prowler -g cislevel1
-
If you want to run Prowler to check multiple AWS accounts in parallel (runs up to 4 simultaneously
-P 4
) but you may want to read below in Advanced Usage section to do so assuming a role:grep -E '^\[([0-9A-Aa-z_-]+)\]' ~/.aws/credentials | tr -d '][' | shuf | \ xargs -n 1 -L 1 -I @ -r -P 4 ./prowler -p @ -M csv 2> /dev/null >> all-accounts.csv
-
For help about usage run:
./prowler -h
Prowler uses the AWS CLI underneath so it uses the same authentication methods. However, there are few ways to run Prowler against multiple accounts using IAM Assume Role feature depending on eachg use case. You can just set up your custom profile inside ~/.aws/config
with all needed information about the role to assume then call it with ./prowler -p your-custom-profile
. Additionally you can use -A 123456789012
and -R RemoteRoleToAssume
and Prowler will get those temporary credentials using aws sts assume-role
, set them up as environment variables and run against that given account. To create a role to assume in multiple accounts easier eather as CFN Stack or StackSet, look at this CloudFormation template and adapt it.
./prowler -A 123456789012 -R ProwlerRole
./prowler -A 123456789012 -R ProwlerRole -I 123456
NOTE 1 about Session Duration: By default it gets credentials valid for 1 hour (3600 seconds). Depending on the mount of checks you run and the size of your infrastructure, Prowler may require more than 1 hour to finish. Use option
-T <seconds>
to allow up to 12h (43200 seconds). To allow more than 1h you need to modify "Maximum CLI/API session duration" for that particular role, read more here.
NOTE 2 about Session Duration: Bear in mind that if you are using roles assumed by role chaining there is a hard limit of 1 hour so consider not using role chaining if possible, read more about that, in foot note 1 below the table here.
For example, if you want to get only the fails in CSV format from all checks regarding RDS without banner from the AWS Account 123456789012 assuming the role RemoteRoleToAssume and set a fixed session duration of 1h:
./prowler -A 123456789012 -R RemoteRoleToAssume -T 3600 -b -M cvs -q -g rds
or with a given External ID:
./prowler -A 123456789012 -R RemoteRoleToAssume -T 3600 -I 123456 -b -M cvs -q -g rds
If you want to run Prowler or just a check or a group across all accounts of AWS Organizations you can do this:
First get a list of accounts that are not suspended:
ACCOUNTS_IN_ORGS=$(aws organizations list-accounts --query Accounts[?Status==`ACTIVE`].Id --output text)
Then run Prowler to assume a role (same in all members) per each account, in this example it is just running one particular check:
for accountId in $ACCOUNTS_IN_ORGS; do ./prowler -A $accountId -R RemoteRoleToAssume -c extra79; done
Usig the same for loop it can be scanned a list of accounts with a variable like ACCOUNTS_LIST='11111111111 2222222222 333333333'
Prowler runs in GovCloud regions as well. To make sure it points to the right API endpoint use -r
to either us-gov-west-1
or us-gov-east-1
. If not filter region is used it will look for resources in both GovCloud regions by default:
./prowler -r us-gov-west-1
For Security Hub integration see below in Security Hub section.
Flag -x /my/own/checks
will include any check in that particular directory. To see how to write checks see Add Custom Checks section.
In order to remove noise and get only FAIL findings there is a -q
flag that makes Prowler to show and log only FAILs. It can be combined with any other option.
./prowler -q -M csv -b
Sets the entropy limit for high entropy base64 strings from environment variable BASE64_LIMIT
. Value must be between 0.0 and 8.0, defaults is 4.5.
Sets the entropy limit for high entropy hex strings from environment variable HEX_LIMIT
. Value must be between 0.0 and 8.0, defaults is 3.0.
export BASE64_LIMIT=4.5
export HEX_LIMIT=3.0
Since October 30th 2020 (version v2.3RC5), Prowler supports natively and as official integration sending findings to AWS Security Hub. This integration allows Prowler to import its findings to AWS Security Hub. With Security Hub, you now have a single place that aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes your security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services, such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, as well as from AWS Partner solutions and from Prowler for free.
Before sending findings to Prowler, you need to perform next steps:
- Since Security Hub is a region based service, enable it in the region or regions you require. Use the AWS Management Console or using the AWS CLI with this command if you have enough permissions:
aws securityhub enable-security-hub --region <region>
.
- Enable Prowler as partner integration integration. Use the AWS Management Console or using the AWS CLI with this command if you have enough permissions:
- As mentioned in section "Custom IAM Policy", to allow Prowler to import its findings to AWS Security Hub you need to add the policy below to the role or user running Prowler:
Once it is enabled, it is as simple as running the command below (for all regions):
./prowler -M json-asff -S
or for only one filtered region like eu-west-1:
./prowler -M json-asff -q -S -f eu-west-1
Note 1: It is recommended to send only fails to Security Hub and that is possible adding
-q
to the command.
Note 2: Since Prowler perform checks to all regions by defaults you may need to filter by region when runing Security Hub integration, as shown in the example above. Remember to enable Security Hub in the region or regions you need by calling
aws securityhub enable-security-hub --region <region>
and run Prowler with the option-f <region>
(if no region is used it will try to push findings in all regions hubs).
Note 3: to have updated findings in Security Hub you have to run Prowler periodically. Once a day or every certain amount of hours.
Once you run findings for first time you will be able to see Prowler findings in Findings section:
To use Prowler and Security Hub integration in GovCloud there is an additional requirement, usage of -r
is needed to point the API queries to the right API endpoint. Here is a sample command that sends only failed findings to Security Hub in region us-gov-west-1
:
./prowler -r us-gov-west-1 -f us-gov-west-1 -S -M csv,json-asff -q
To use Prowler and Security Hub integration in China regions there is an additional requirement, usage of -r
is needed to point the API queries to the right API endpoint. Here is a sample command that sends only failed findings to Security Hub in region cn-north-1
:
./prowler -r cn-north-1 -f cn-north-1 -q -S -M csv,json-asff
Either to run Prowler once or based on a schedule this template makes it pretty straight forward. This template will create a CodeBuild environment and run Prowler directly leaving all reports in a bucket and creating a report also inside CodeBuild basedon the JUnit output from Prowler. Scheduling can be cron based like cron(0 22 * * ? *)
or rate based like rate(5 hours)
since CloudWatch Event rules (or Eventbridge) is used here.
The Cloud Formation template that helps you doing that is here.
This is a simple solution to monitor one account. For multiples accounts see Multi Account and Continuous Monitoring.
Sometimes you may find resources that are intentionally configured in a certain way that may be a bad practice but it is all right with it, for example an S3 bucket open to the internet hosting a web site, or a security group with an open port needed in your use case. Now you can use -w whitelist_sample.txt
and add your resources as checkID:resourcename
as in this command:
./prowler -w whitelist_sample.txt
Whitelist option works along with other options and adds a WARNING
instead of INFO
, PASS
or FAIL
to any output format except for json-asff
.
Check your report and fix the issues following all specific guidelines per check in https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_CIS_Foundations_Benchmark.pdf
If you are using an STS token for AWS-CLI and your session is expired you probably get this error:
A client error (ExpiredToken) occurred when calling the GenerateCredentialReport operation: The security token included in the request is expired
To fix it, please renew your token by authenticating again to the AWS API, see next section below if you use MFA.
To run Prowler using a profile that requires MFA you just need to get the session token before hand. Just make sure you use this command:
aws --profile <YOUR_AWS_PROFILE> sts get-session-token --duration 129600 --serial-number <ARN_OF_MFA> --token-code <MFA_TOKEN_CODE> --output text
Once you get your token you can export it as environment variable:
export AWS_PROFILE=YOUR_AWS_PROFILE
export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=YOUR_NEW_TOKEN
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=YOUR_SECRET
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=YOUR_KEY
or set manually up your ~/.aws/credentials
file properly.
There are some helpfull tools to save time in this process like aws-mfa-script or aws-cli-mfa.
- Use case: This user can view a list of AWS resources and basic metadata in the account across all services. The user cannot read resource content or metadata that goes beyond the quota and list information for resources.
- Policy description: This policy grants List*, Describe*, Get*, View*, and Lookup* access to resources for most AWS services. To see what actions this policy includes for each service, see ViewOnlyAccess Permissions
- Use case: This user monitors accounts for compliance with security requirements. This user can access logs and events to investigate potential security breaches or potential malicious activity.
- Policy description: This policy grants permissions to view configuration data for many AWS services and to review their logs. To see what actions this policy includes for each service, see SecurityAudit Permissions
Some new and specific checks require Prowler to inherit more permissions than SecurityAudit and ViewOnlyAccess to work properly. In addition to the AWS managed policies, "SecurityAudit" and "ViewOnlyAccess", the user/role you use for checks may need to be granted a custom policy with a few more read-only permissions (to support additional services mostly). Here is an example policy with the additional rights, "Prowler-Additions-Policy" (see below bootstrap script for set it up):
Allows Prowler to import its findings to AWS Security Hub. More information in Security Hub integration:
Quick bash script to set up a "prowler" IAM user with "SecurityAudit" and "ViewOnlyAccess" group with the required permissions (including "Prowler-Additions-Policy"). To run the script below, you need user with administrative permissions; set the AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE
to use that account:
export AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE=default
export ACCOUNT_ID=$(aws sts get-caller-identity --query 'Account' | tr -d '"')
aws iam create-group --group-name Prowler
aws iam create-policy --policy-name Prowler-Additions-Policy --policy-document file://$(pwd)/iam/prowler-additions-policy.json
aws iam attach-group-policy --group-name Prowler --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/SecurityAudit
aws iam attach-group-policy --group-name Prowler --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/job-function/ViewOnlyAccess
aws iam attach-group-policy --group-name Prowler --policy-arn arn:aws:iam::${ACCOUNT_ID}:policy/Prowler-Additions-Policy
aws iam create-user --user-name prowler
aws iam add-user-to-group --user-name prowler --group-name Prowler
aws iam create-access-key --user-name prowler
unset ACCOUNT_ID AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE
The aws iam create-access-key
command will output the secret access key and the key id; keep these somewhere safe, and add them to ~/.aws/credentials
with an appropriate profile name to use them with Prowler. This is the only time they secret key will be shown. If you lose it, you will need to generate a replacement.
This CloudFormation template may also help you on that task.
We are adding additional checks to improve the information gather from each account, these checks are out of the scope of the CIS benchmark for AWS but we consider them very helpful to get to know each AWS account set up and find issues on it.
Some of these checks look for publicly facing resources may not actually be fully public due to other layered controls like S3 Bucket Policies, Security Groups or Network ACLs.
To list all existing checks in the extras group run the command below:
./prowler -l -g extras
There are some checks not included in that list, they are experimental or checks that takes long to run like
extra759
andextra760
(search for secrets in Lambda function variables and code).
To check all extras in one command:
./prowler -g extras
or to run just one of the checks:
./prowler -c extraNUMBER
or to run multiple extras in one go:
./prowler -c extraNumber,extraNumber
With this group of checks, Prowler looks if each service with logging or audit capabilities has them enabled to ensure all needed evidences are recorded and collected for an eventual digital forensic investigation in case of incident. List of checks part of this group (you can also see all groups with ./prowler -L
). The list of checks can be seen in the group file at:
The forensics-ready
group of checks uses existing and extra checks. To get a forensics readiness report, run this command:
./prowler -g forensics-ready
With this group of checks, Prowler shows result of checks related to GDPR, more information here. The list of checks can be seen in the group file at:
The gdpr
group of checks uses existing and extra checks. To get a GDPR report, run this command:
./prowler -g gdpr
With this group of checks, Prowler shows results of controls related to the "Security Rule" of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act aka HIPAA as defined in 45 CFR Subpart C - Security Standards for the Protection of Electronic Protected Health Information within PART 160 - GENERAL ADMINISTRATIVE REQUIREMENTS and Subpart A and Subpart C of PART 164 - SECURITY AND PRIVACY
More information on the original PR is here.
Under the HIPAA regulations, cloud service providers (CSPs) such as AWS are considered business associates. The Business Associate Addendum (BAA) is an AWS contract that is required under HIPAA rules to ensure that AWS appropriately safeguards protected health information (PHI). The BAA also serves to clarify and limit, as appropriate, the permissible uses and disclosures of PHI by AWS, based on the relationship between AWS and our customers, and the activities or services being performed by AWS. Customers may use any AWS service in an account designated as a HIPAA account, but they should only process, store, and transmit protected health information (PHI) in the HIPAA-eligible services defined in the Business Associate Addendum (BAA). For the latest list of HIPAA-eligible AWS services, see HIPAA Eligible Services Reference.
More information on AWS & HIPAA can be found here
The list of checks showed by this group is as follows, they will be mostly relevant for Subsections 164.306 Security standards: General rules and 164.312 Technical safeguards. Prowler is only able to make checks in the spirit of the technical requirements outlined in these Subsections, and cannot cover all procedural controls required. They be found in the group file at:
The hipaa
group of checks uses existing and extra checks. To get a HIPAA report, run this command:
./prowler -g hipaa
The term "trust boundary" is originating from the threat modelling process and the most popular contributor Adam Shostack and author of "Threat Modeling: Designing for Security" defines it as following (reference):
Trust boundaries are perhaps the most subjective of all: these represent the border between trusted and untrusted elements. Trust is complex. You might trust your mechanic with your car, your dentist with your teeth, and your banker with your money, but you probably don't trust your dentist to change your spark plugs.
AWS is made to be flexible for service links within and between different AWS accounts, we all know that.
This group of checks helps to analyse a particular AWS account (subject) on existing links to other AWS accounts across various AWS services, in order to identify untrusted links.
To give it a quick shot just call:
./prowler -g trustboundaries
Currently this check group supports two different scenarios:
- Single account environment: no action required, the configuration is happening automatically for you.
- Multi account environment: in case you environment has multiple trusted and known AWS accounts you maybe want to append them manually to groups/group16_trustboundaries as a space separated list into
GROUP_TRUSTBOUNDARIES_TRUSTED_ACCOUNT_IDS
variable, then just run prowler.
Current coverage of Amazon Web Service (AWS) taken from here:
Topic | Service | Trust Boundary |
---|---|---|
Networking and Content Delivery | Amazon VPC | VPC endpoints connections (extra786) |
VPC endpoints whitelisted principals (extra787) |
All ideas or recommendations to extend this group are very welcome here.
The diagrams depict two common scenarios, single account and multi account environments. Every circle represents one AWS account. The dashed line represents the trust boundary, that separates trust and untrusted AWS accounts. The arrow simply describes the direction of the trust, however the data can potentially flow in both directions.
Single Account environment assumes that only the AWS account subject to this analysis is trusted. However there is a chance that two VPCs are existing within that one AWS account which are still trusted as a self reference.
Multi Account environments assumes a minimum of two trusted or known accounts. For this particular example all trusted and known accounts will be tested. Therefore GROUP_TRUSTBOUNDARIES_TRUSTED_ACCOUNT_IDS
variable in groups/group16_trustboundaries should include all trusted accounts Account #A, Account #B, Account #C, and Account #D in order to finally raise Account #E and Account #F for being untrusted or unknown.
In order to add any new check feel free to create a new extra check in the extras group or other group. To do so, you will need to follow these steps:
- Follow structure in file
checks/check_sample
- Name your check with a number part of an existing group or a new one
- Save changes and run it as
./prowler -c extraNN
- Send me a pull request! :)
- Follow structure in file
groups/groupN_sample
- Name your group with a non existing number
- Save changes and run it as
./prowler -g extraNN
- Send me a pull request! :)
- You can also create a group with only the checks that you want to perform in your company, for instance a group named
group9_mycompany
with only the list of checks that you care or your particular compliance applies.
Javier Pecete has done an awesome job integrating Prowler with Telegram, you have more details here https://github.com/i4specete/ServerTelegramBot
The guys of SecurityFTW have added Prowler in their Cloud Security Suite along with other cool security tools https://github.com/SecurityFTW/cs-suite
Prowler is licensed as Apache License 2.0 as specified in each file. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
I'm not related anyhow with CIS organization, I just write and maintain Prowler to help companies over the world to make their cloud infrastructure more secure.
If you want to contact me visit https://blyx.com/contact or follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/toniblyx my DMs are open.