Configuration

Trivy tries to load trivy-secret.yaml in the current directory by default. If the file doesn't exist, only built-in rules are used. You can customize the config file path via the --secret-config flag.

You can see the example here.

Custom Rules

Trivy allows defining custom rules. You can see an example.

rules:
  - id: rule1
    category: general
    title: Generic Rule
    severity: HIGH
    path: .*\.sh
    keywords:
      - secret
    regex: (?i)(?P<key>(secret))(=|:).{0,5}['"](?P<secret>[0-9a-zA-Z\-_=]{8,64})['"]
    secret-group-name: secret
    allow-rules:
      - id: skip-text
        description: skip text files
        path: .*\.txt

id (required)

• Unique identifier for this rule.

category (required)

• String used for metadata and reporting purposes.

title (required)

• Short human-readable title of the rule.

severity (required)

• How critical this rule is.
• Allowed values:
  • CRITICAL
  • HIGH
  • MEDIUM
  • LOW

regex (required)

• Golang regular expression used to detect secrets.

path (optional)

• Golang regular expression used to match paths.

keywords (optional, recommended)

• Keywords are used for pre-regex check filtering.
• Rules that contain keywords will perform a quick string compare check to make sure the keyword(s) are in the content being scanned.
• Ideally these values should either be part of the identifier or unique strings specific to the rule's regex.
• It is recommended to define for better performance.

allow-rules (optional)

• Allow rules for a single rule to reduce false positives with known secrets.
• The details are below.

Allow Rules

If the detected secret is matched with the specified regex, then that secret will be skipped and not detected. The same logic applies for path.

allow-rules can be defined globally and per each rule. The fields are the same.

rules:
  - id: rule1
    category: general
    title: Generic Rule
    severity: HIGH
    regex: (?i)(?P<key>(secret))(=|:).{0,5}['"](?P<secret>[0-9a-zA-Z\-_=]{8,64})['"]
    allow-rules:
      - id: skip-text
        description: skip text files
        path: .*\.txt
allow-rules:
  - id: social-security-number
    description: skip social security number
    regex: 219-09-9999

id (required)

• Unique identifier for this allow rule.

description (optional)

• Short human-readable description of this allow rule.

regex (optional)

• Golang regular expression used to allow detected secrets.
• regex or path must be specified.

path (optional)

• Golang regular expression used to allow matched paths.
• regex or path must be specified.

Enable Rules

Trivy provides plenty of out-of-box rules and allow rules, but you may not need all of them. In that case, enable-builin-rules will be helpful. If you just need AWS secret detection, you can enable only relevant rules as shown below. It specifies AWS-related rule IDs in enable-builin-rules. All other rules are disabled, so the scanning will be much faster. We would strongly recommend using this option if you don't need all rules.

You can see a full list of built-in rule IDs and built-in allow rule IDs.

enable-builtin-rules:
  - aws-access-key-id
  - aws-account-id
  - aws-secret-access-key

Disable Rules

Trivy offers built-in rules and allow rules, but you may want to disable some of them. For example, you don't use Slack, so Slack doesn't have to be scanned. You can specify the Slack rule IDs, slack-access-token and slack-web-hook in disable-rules so that those rules will be disabled for less false positives.

You should specify either enable-builin-rules or disable-rules. If they both are specified, disable-rules takes precedence. In case github-pat is specified in enable-builin-rules and disable-rules, it will be disabled.

In addition, there are some allow rules. Markdown files are ignored by default, but you may want to scan markdown files as well. You can disable the allow rule by adding markdown to disable-allow-rules.

You can see a full list of built-in rule IDs and built-in allow rule IDs.

disable-rules:
  - slack-access-token
  - slack-web-hook
disable-allow-rules:
  - markdown