INTERCEPT - Policy As Code Static Analysis Auditing - Hacking Land

Stupidly easy to use, small footprint Policy as Code subsecond command-line scanner that leverages the power of the fastest multi-line search tool to scan your codebase. It can be used as a linter, guard rail control or simple data collector and inspector. Consider it a weaponized ripgrep. Works on Mac, Linux and Windows.

How it works

intercept binary
policies yaml file
(included) latest ripgrep binary
(optional) exceptions yaml file

Intercept merges environment flags, policies yaml, exceptions yaml to generate a global config. Uses ripgrep to scan a target path for policy breaches recursively against your code and generates a human readable detailed output of the findings.

Use cases

Simple and powerful free drop-in alternative for Hashicorp Sentinel if you are more comfortable writing and maintaining regular expressions than using a new custom policy language.
Do you find Open Policy Agent rego files too much sugar for your pipeline?
Captures the patterns from git-secrets and trufflehog and can prevent sensitive information to run through your pipeline. (trufflehog regex)
Identifies policy breach (files and line numbers), reports solutions/suggestions to its findings making it a great tool to ease onboarding developer teams to your unified deployment pipeline.
Can enforce style-guides, coding-standards, best practices and also report on suboptimal configurations.
Can collect patterns or high entropy data and output it in multiple formats.
Anything you can crunch on a regular expression can be actioned on.

Latest Release :

  # Standard package (intercept + ripgrep) for individual platforms
     -- intercept-rg-linux.zip
     -- intercept-rg-macos.zip
     -- intercept-rg-win.zip
 
   # Clean package (intercept only) for individual platforms
     -- core-intercept-linux.zip
     -- core-intercept-macos.zip
     -- core-intercept-win.zip
 
   # Full package (intercept + ripgrep) for all platforms
     -- x-intercept.zip
 
   # Package needed to fully use the Makefile
     -- setup-buildpack.zip
 
   # Package of the latest compatible release of ripgrep (doesn't include intercept)
     -- i-ripgrep-linux.zip
     -- i-ripgrep-macos.zip
     -- i-ripgrep-win.zip

Download the standard package for your platform to get started

Used in production
INTERCEPT was created to lint thousands of infra deployments a day with minor human intervention, the first MVP been running for a year already with no reported flaws. Keep in mind INTERCEPT is not and does not pretend to be a security tool. It's easy to circumvent a regex pattern once you know it, but the main objective of this tool is to pro-actively help the developers fix their code and assist with style suggestions to keep the codebase clean and avoid trivial support tickets for the uneducated crowd.

Inspired by

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Why ripgrep ? Why is it fast?

It is built on top of Rust's regex engine. Rust's regex engine uses finite automata, SIMD and aggressive literal optimizations to make searching very fast. (PCRE2 support) Rust's regex library maintains performance with full Unicode support by building UTF-8 decoding directly into its deterministic finite automaton engine.
It supports searching with either memory maps or by searching incrementally with an intermediate buffer. The former is better for single files and the latter is better for large directories. ripgrep chooses the best searching strategy for you automatically.
Applies ignore patterns in .gitignore files using a RegexSet. That means a single file path can be matched against multiple glob patterns simultaneously.
It uses a lock-free parallel recursive directory iterator, courtesy of crossbeam and ignore.

Benchmark ripgrep

Tool	Command	Line count	Time
ripgrep (Unicode)	`rg -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'`	450	0.106s
git grep	`LC_ALL=C git grep -E -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'`	450	0.553s
The Silver Searcher	`ag -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'`	450	0.589s
git grep (Unicode)	`LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 git grep -E -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'`	450	2.266s
sift	`sift --git -n -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'`	450	3.505s
ack	`ack -w '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'`	1878	6.823s
The Platinum Searcher	`pt -w -e '[A-Z]+_SUSPEND'`	450	14.208s