Policy as Code for Security Tests

Last updated on Mar 25, 2026

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Harness provides governance using Open Policy Agent (OPA), Policy Management, and Rego policies.

You can create a policy and apply it to security test results in your Account, Org, or Project. The policy is evaluated on security test events:

• On Step — evaluated after a scan step completes in a pipeline.

Security Tests policies let you enforce governance on scan results produced by Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO). Common use cases include:

• Blocking pipelines when critical or high-severity vulnerabilities are found
• Warning or blocking based on specific CVE reference IDs
• Enforcing code coverage thresholds
• Filtering vulnerabilities by age, EPSS score, or reachability

For more details, see the Harness Governance Quickstart.

Prerequisites

• Harness Governance Overview
• Harness Governance Quickstart
• A pipeline with at least one STO scan step configured
• Policies use the OPA authoring language Rego. For more information, see OPA Policy Authoring.

Step 1: Add a policy

1. In Harness, go to Account Settings → Policies → New Policy.

2. Enter a Name for your policy and click Apply.

3. Add your Rego policy in the editor.

   You can write your own Rego policy or use a sample from the Library panel. Select the Library tab, choose Entity: Security Tests from the dropdown:

   

   Harness ships many built-in sample policies for security tests:

   Sample policy	Description
   Security Tests – Reference Identifier	Blocks based on specific reference identifiers such as CVE, CWE, etc.
   Security Tests – Occurrences for a Vulnerability	Blocks based on specific number of occurrences for an issue/vulnerability
   Security Tests – Severity	Blocks based on severity values (Critical, High)
   Security Tests – Issue Title	Blocks based on the issue title/name
   Security Tests – CVE Age	Blocks issues based on CVE age and severity
   Security Tests – Code Coverage	Blocks based on code coverage metric
   Security Tests – External Policy Failures	Blocks based on external policy failures
   Security Tests – Severity found in App Layer	Blocks based on severity values (Critical, High) found in application layer
   Security Tests – Severity found in Base Image	Blocks based on severity values (Critical, High) found in base image
   Security Tests – EPSS score found in issues	Blocks based on the EPSS score provided
   Security Tests – Static Reachability of an Issue	Blocks based on the reachability status of an issue/vulnerability

   For the full Rego code of each sample policy, see Security Tests policy samples.

   For a detailed walkthrough on creating Security Tests OPA policies, see Create OPA policies for STO.

4. Click Save.

Step 2: Add the policy to a policy set

After creating your policy, add it to a Policy Set before it can be enforced on security test results.

1. Go to Policies → Policy Sets → New Policy Set.

2. Enter a Name and optional Description for the Policy Set.

3. In Entity type, select Security Tests.

4. In On what event should the Policy Set be evaluated, select On Step.

5. Click Continue.

6. In Policy evaluation criteria, click Add Policy.

7. In the Select Policy dialog, choose the scope (Project, Org, or Account) and select the policy you created.

   

8. Select the severity and action for policy violations:

   • Warn & continue — a warning is displayed if the policy is not met, but the pipeline continues.
   • Error and exit — the pipeline fails if the policy is not met.

9. Click Apply, then click Finish.

10. The Policy Set is automatically set to Enforced. To disable enforcement, toggle off the Enforced button.

Step 3: Apply the policy to a scan step

After creating and enforcing your Policy Set, it is automatically evaluated after any scan step completes in a pipeline.

1. Go to Pipelines and open a pipeline with an STO scan step.

2. Run the pipeline.

3. After the scan step completes, the policy is evaluated against the scan results:

   • If the results meet the policy, the pipeline continues.
   • If the results violate the policy and the severity is Warn & continue, the pipeline continues with a warning.
   • If the results violate the policy and the severity is Error and exit, the pipeline fails with an error.

See also

• Create OPA policies for STO
• Security Tests policy samples
• Harness Governance Overview