Checkmarx step configuration

The Checkmarx step in Harness STO enables you to scan your code for security vulnerabilities, you can perform Checkmarx CxSAST, CxSCA, and CxOSA scanning in Orchestration, Ingestion and Extraction modes of STO. This document will guide you through understanding the fields, configuring them, and providing any necessary information for setting up the step.

Root access requirements

If you want to add trusted certificates to your scan images at runtime, you need to run the scan step with root access.

You can utilize custom STO scan images and pipelines to run scans as a non-root user. For more details, refer Configure your pipeline to use STO images from private registry.

Checkmarx step settings

The recommended workflow is to add a Checkmarx step to a Security or Build stage and then configure it as described below.

Scan

Scan Mode

• Orchestration mode: In this mode, the step executes the scan, then processes the results by normalizing and deduplicating them.

• Ingestion mode: In this mode, the Checkmarx step reads scan results from a data file, normalizes the data, and removes duplicates. It supports ingestion of results from any Checkmarx scanner that produces output in the SARIF format.

• Extraction mode: In this mode, the Checkmarx step retrieves scan results from the Checkmarx portal and stores them in STO. This mode is supported only for Checkmarx SAST (CxSAST).

Scan Configuration

The predefined configuration to use for the scan. All scan steps have at least one configuration.

• SAST or Default - Checkmarx Static Application Security Testing. Checkmarx step runs a SAST scan using the CxConsole CLI
• CxSCA - Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis
• CxOSA - Checkmarx Open Source Analysis

Target

Type

• Repository Scan a codebase repo.

  In most cases, you specify the codebase using a code repo connector that connects to the Git account or repository where your code is stored. For information, go to Configure codebase.

Target and variant detection

When Auto is enabled for code repositories, the step detects these values using git:

• To detect the target, the step runs git config --get remote.origin.url.
• To detect the variant, the step runs git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD. The default assumption is that the HEAD branch is the one you want to scan.

Note the following:

• Auto is not available when the Scan Mode is Ingestion.
• Auto is the default selection for new pipelines. Manual is the default for old pipelines, but you might find that neither radio button is selected in the UI.

Name

The identifier for the target, such as codebaseAlpha or jsmith/myalphaservice. Descriptive target names make it much easier to navigate your scan data in the STO UI.

It is good practice to specify a baseline for every target.

Variant

The identifier for the specific variant to scan. This is usually the branch name, image tag, or product version. Harness maintains a historical trend for each variant.

Workspace

The workspace path on the pod running the scan step. The workspace path is /harness by default.

You can override this if you want to scan only a subset of the workspace. For example, suppose the pipeline publishes artifacts to a subfolder /tmp/artifacts and you want to scan these artifacts only. In this case, you can specify the workspace path as /harness/tmp/artifacts.

Additionally, you can specify individual files to scan as well. For instance, if you only want to scan a specific file like /tmp/iac/infra.tf, you can specify the workspace path as /harness/tmp/iac/infra.tf

Ingestion File

The path to your scan results when running an Ingestion scan, for example /shared/scan_results/myscan.latest.sarif.

• The data file must be in a supported format for the scanner.

• The data file must be accessible to the scan step. It's good practice to save your results files to a shared path in your stage. In the visual editor, go to the stage where you're running the scan. Then go to Overview > Shared Paths. You can also add the path to the YAML stage definition like this:

      - stage:
        spec:
          sharedPaths:
            - /shared/scan_results

Authentication

Domain

The fully-qualified URL to the scanner.

• For Default and CxOSA scan configurations, the domain URL must end with the /cxrestapi route.
• For CxSCA scan configuration, the domain should be set to sca.checkmarx.net.

Enforce SSL

The step and the scanner communicate over SSL by default. Set this to false to disable SSL (not safe).

Access ID

The username to log in to the scanner.

Access Token

The access token to log in to the scanner. This is usually a password or an API key.

You should create a Harness text secret with your encrypted token and reference the secret using the format <+secrets.getValue("my-access-token")>. For more information, go to Add and Reference Text Secrets.

Scan Tool

Team Name

The Checkmarx team name. Use the format /<server-name>/<team-name> — for example, /server1.myorg.org/devOpsEast. In some cases, your Checkmarx's Account or Tenet name may be used as the Team Name.

Project Name

The name of the scan project as defined in the scanner. This is the also the target name in the Harness UI (Security Tests > Test Targets).

If the specified project does not exist, the step will create a new project using the provided Project Name.

Log Level

The minimum severity of the messages you want to include in your scan logs. You can specify one of the following:

• DEBUG
• INFO
• WARNING
• ERROR

Additional CLI flags

Use this field to run the Checkmarx plugin with flags such as:

• -incremental — Run an incremental scan.
• -LocationPathExclude— Exclude one or more paths from the scan.
• -LocationFilesExclude — Exclude one or more paths from the scan.
• -OsaPathExclude — Exclude matching paths from the scan.
• -OsaFilesExclude — Exclude matching files from the scan.

caution

Passing additional CLI flags is an advanced feature. Harness recommends the following best practices:

• Test your flags and arguments thoroughly before you use them in your Harness pipelines. Some flags might not work in the context of STO.

• Don't add flags that are already used in the default configuration of the scan step.

  To check the default configuration, go to a pipeline execution where the scan step ran with no additional flags. Check the log output for the scan step. You should see a line like this:

  Command [ scancmd -f json -o /tmp/output.json ]

  In this case, don't add -f or -o to Additional CLI flags.

Running incremental scans with Checkmarx

In some cases, you might want to run an incremental rather than a full scan with Checkmarx due to time or licensing limits. An incremental scan evaluates only new or changed code in a merge or pull request. Incremental scans are faster than full scans, but become less accurate over time.

note

Consider carefully when to run incremental vs. full scans. See When should I use Incremental Scans vs Full Scans in CxSAST? in the Checkmarx documentation.

Fail on Severity

Every STO scan step has a Fail on Severity setting. If the scan finds any vulnerability with the specified severity level or higher, the pipeline fails automatically. You can specify one of the following:

• CRITICAL
• HIGH
• MEDIUM
• LOW
• INFO
• NONE — Do not fail on severity

The YAML definition looks like this: fail_on_severity : critical # | high | medium | low | info | none

Exclude issues marked as Not Exploited

You can configure the Checkmarx ingestion step to exclude issues detected by Checkmarx but flagged as Not Exploitable. To enable this setting, add the following key-value pair under Settings:

hide_not_exploitable : True

Additional Configuration

The fields under Additional Configuration vary based on the type of infrastructure. Depending on the infrastructure type selected, some fields may or may not appear in your settings. Below are the details for each field

• Override Security Test Image
  • Container Registry
  • Image Tag
• Privileged
• Image Pull Policy
• Run as User
• Set Container Resources
• Timeout

Advanced settings

In the Advanced settings, you can use the following options:

• Conditional Execution
• Failure Strategy
• Looping Strategy
• Policy Enforcement

Proxy settings

This step supports Harness Secure Connect if you're using Harness Cloud infrastructure. During the Secure Connect setup, the HTTPS_PROXY and HTTP_PROXY variables are automatically configured to route traffic through the secure tunnel. If there are specific addresses that you want to bypass the Secure Connect proxy, you can define those in the NO_PROXY variable. This can be configured in the Settings of your step.

If you need to configure a different proxy (not using Secure Connect), you can manually set the HTTPS_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY, and NO_PROXY variables in the Settings of your step.

Definitions of Proxy variables:

• HTTPS_PROXY: Specify the proxy server for HTTPS requests, example https://sc.internal.harness.io:30000
• HTTP_PROXY: Specify the proxy server for HTTP requests, example http://sc.internal.harness.io:30000
• NO_PROXY: Specify the domains as comma-separated values that should bypass the proxy. This allows you to exclude certain traffic from being routed through the proxy.