KICS

Judgement

What it is

Developer tool

What it does

Scans infrastructure code such as Terraform, Kubernetes manifests, CloudFormation, Ansible and Dockerfiles for security and compliance problems using editable Rego queries.

Adopt it when

You want an open-source infrastructure code scanner whose rules are written in Open Policy Agent's Rego, so you can edit and add your own.

Watch out

It is maintained by Checkmarx as a funnel to its commercial platform, and the community around it is smaller than Checkov's or Trivy's.

Ready for

Usable

Runs as

Command line

Built with

Go and Rego

How established

Established: started 6 years ago, latest release v2.2.0.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: KICS → Postgres → GCC → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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