Repeating Scans on a Schedule

Introduction

In this step-by-step tutorial, we will go through all the required stages to set up a repeating scan with the secureCodeBox. A repeating scan will run automatically each time a time interval is passed. This time interval is set by the user. In this example, we are going to run a repeating wpscan scan against the local "old-wordpress" vulnerable demo-target. A repeating scan is useful, as it allows the developer to be aware of any new vulnerabilities that have been introduced in development.

Setup

For the sake of the tutorial, we assume that you have your Kubernetes cluster already up and running and that we can work in your default namespace. If not, check out the installation for more information.

We will start by installing the wpscan scanner:

helm upgrade --install wpscan oci://ghcr.io/securecodebox/helm/wpscan

And the Wordpress demo-target. This is only required if you don't already have a target you want to scan.

helm upgrade --install old-wordpress oci://ghcr.io/securecodebox/helm/old-wordpress

Creating the Repeating Scan

After everything is set up properly, we can now configure the repeating scan. We create a scheduled-scan.yaml where we define what the scan should do:

scheduled-scan.yaml

apiVersion: "execution.securecodebox.io/v1"
kind: ScheduledScan
metadata:
  name: "old-wordpress-scan-every-5min"
spec:
  interval: 5m
  scanSpec:
    scanType: "wpscan"
    parameters:
      - "--url"
      - old-wordpress
  successfulJobsHistoryLimit: 3
  failedJobsHistoryLimit: 5

We set the kind to ScheduledScan. This tells secureCodeBox to use the ScheduledScan CRD. The interval here is set to 5 minutes (5m). This is only done to have quicker results for the example. If you're doing this on a real scan target, use a bigger time frame. It should be noted that hours (h) is the biggest unit that can be used. More info here.

The successfulJobsHistoryLimit controls how many completed scans are supposed to be kept until the oldest one will be deleted. And the failedJobsHistoryLimit controls how many failed scans are supposed to be kept until the oldest one will be deleted.

The rest of the parameters are set according to your scanType. In this case it's wpscan. Its corresponding scanner configuration can be found here.

Now we can run our scheduled scan via:

kubectl apply -f scheduled-scan.yaml

The scan should be properly created and you should see it running via:

kubectl get scheduledscans

And you get the following (The findings column might be different):

NAME                            TYPE     INTERVAL   FINDINGS
old-wordpress-scan-every-5min   wpscan   5m         5

Hint: If you want to restart the scan immediatly without wating, you can delete and recreate it:

# Delete our specific scheduled scan:
kubectl delete scheduledscan old-wordpress-scan-every-5min

We can check on the individual scans that have been done according to this scheduled/repeating scan via:

kubectl get scans

After 15 minutes, we see the following:

NAME                                       TYPE     STATE   FINDINGS
old-wordpress-scan-every-5min-1633093504   wpscan   Done    5
old-wordpress-scan-every-5min-1633093805   wpscan   Done    5
old-wordpress-scan-every-5min-1633094105   wpscan   Done    5

We can also make sure that the time interval is being respected by the ScheduledScan by looking at the age of the pods in use via:

kubectl get pods

You would see something similar to this. The pod name suffix is not going to be the same.

NAME                                                        READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
scan-old-wordpress-scan-every-5min-1633093504-7h--1-msn8t   0/2     Completed   0          12m
scan-old-wordpress-scan-every-5min-1633093805-cm--1-jwgz2   0/2     Completed   0          7m40s
scan-old-wordpress-scan-every-5min-1633094105-zb--1-qkxzw   0/2     Completed   0          2m40s

And we're done! The repeating scan now works. Take a look at cascading scans next if you haven't yet. Cascading scans and repeating scans work well together. Have fun!