Top 9 OSS CSPM Tools to Consider

As businesses increasingly rely on cloud environments to store, manage, and secure their data, maintaining a strong cloud security posture has become critical. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools play a pivotal role in this by providing continuous monitoring, vulnerability detection, and compliance enforcement across cloud infrastructures. Open source CSPM (OSS CSPM) tools, in particular, provide a cost-effective and flexible way for organizations to strengthen their cloud defenses without committing to expensive enterprise solutions.

In this article, we'll explore the top 9 OSS CSPM tools available today, each with their own unique capabilities and benefits to help organizations identify cloud misconfigurations, prevent security breaches, and ensure compliance with industry standards. Whether you're looking for tools that specialize in configuration management, compliance auditing, or vulnerability detection, this list will provide valuable information about which tools may be best suited to your organization's needs.

Managing your cloud security posture: a refresher

CSPM is the practice of managing and protecting cloud environments through end-to-end cloud visibility, vulnerability detection, and risk management. A term coined by Gartner, CSPM involves the use of tools that automate the continuous monitoring and resolution of cloud vulnerabilities in IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS environments.

CSPM tools identify misconfigurations, broken authorization/weak access controls, insecure APIs, and more in real-time to reduce the risk of data breaches. They also enforce regulatory standards and internal security policies to prevent non-compliance fines and ensure best operational practices. Even better? Their contextual insights streamline DevSecOps processes and enhance incident response.

Key CSPM capabilities to look for

Although many OSS CSPM software options provide the above benefits (and more), other CSPM solutions are limited in scope. For example, some tools enable automatic remediation of security risks, while others simply detect issues, leaving the rest of the work to your teams. To get the most out of your chosen CSPM tool, be on the lookout for the following capabilities:

Comprehensive cloud resource inventory: Make sure the tool you choose shows in clear terms where compute and storage resources are located in your cloud.

Accurate risk detection: Make sure the tool you choose can measure your cloud, host, and application configurations against industry best practices to detect misconfigurations/exploitable vulnerabilities.

Contextual reporting and risk prioritization: Consider the CSPM product's ability to understand your business contexts and use these insights to prioritize the risks you are most vulnerable to.

Multi-cloud monitoring: Choose a solution that integrates monitoring across different cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP into one unified dashboard to seamlessly track risks.

Compliance management and policy enforcement: Consider using a tool that can quickly address compliance violations and help you enforce your organization's policies and standards. For example, select a solution that will alert your teams in real-time when new configurations deviate from internal security policies.

Top 9 OSS CSPM Tools

Here are the top 9 OSS CSPM software and their core capabilities:

1. CIS-CAT Lite

CIS-CAT Lite is the free version of the Center for Internet Security's cloud security and compliance assessment tool. Designed specifically to implement CIS standards, CIS-CAT Lite enforces secure configurations across different clouds, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Capabilities

Pros

cons

2. Cloudsploit

Self-hosted CloudSploit is an open source version of the Aqua CSPM solution. It offers a range of features for managing cloud security and compliance. First, CloudSploit's configuration file allows you to send credentials and data from your cloud infrastructure for scanning. The results are then sent to the console in a tabular format, giving you a quick look at cloud risks.

Capabilities

Manage cloud misconfiguration in Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AWS, GCP, and GitHub

Manage compliance with HIPAA, CIS and PCI DSS standards

Collects cloud infrastructure data as JSON files, environment variables, or encrypted data

Pros

Custom policies can be defined

Detects more than 1000 risks and vulnerabilities

Minimal performance impact because it scans in the background

cons

It offers native support for AWS but requires additional functionality to monitor other clouds

Tabular reports are not comprehensive, which can make processing cumbersome

It allows hard-coded cloud data to be processed, which may pose data security risks

3. Gaps

Gapps is a cloud compliance and security posture management platform that integrates with various cloud infrastructure.

Capabilities

Supports more than 10 compliance frameworks, including SOC2, NIST, and SSF

Out-of-the-box support for 1,500+ controls and 25+ policies

Support the creation and implementation of custom policies

Pros

cons

4. Lynes

Lynis is designed for Linux, FreeBSD, MAC, Unix, and other Unix-based systems running on hosts. Lynis performs compliance and security posture checks.

Capabilities

HIPAA, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 compliance assessment

Provides recommendations to strengthen the system

Vulnerability/misconfiguration detection

Intrusion detection

Pros

Multi-language support

Custom security controls

cons

5. Magpie

Magpie consists of layered FIFO queues that allow it to output query results in order while running as a single process or as a group of processes across multiple machines. It has a plugin architecture that integrates with AWS and GCP clouds, enabling security engineers to unify CSPM scans from both clouds.

The magpie works in four stages:

Enumeration, which detects your cloud infrastructure

Query, which analyzes the infrastructure for security risks

Transformation, which transforms query data for final processing

Output, which outputs data as JSON files or sends it to Kafka or PostgreSQL

Capabilities

Discover assets and services, including shadow and abandoned clouds, non-native applications, and data stores using DMAP

Misconfiguration and management of regulatory compliance, including AWS CIS security standards

Implement security best practices through the security policies and rules engine

Pros

Store historical security and compliance assessments to enable trend analysis and compliance auditing

Built-in ransomware rules to prevent ransomware and supply chain attacks

Data preview feature to analyze sensitive data without exposing systems to data-centric attacks

cons

Does not support IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft Azure

Kubernetes and serverless resources cannot be inspected

6. Openscape

OpenSCAP is a toolkit that contains a set of cloud security, policy, and compliance management tools. Includes OpenSCAP Base, Workbench, Daemon, and more, helping secure clouds, containers, and container images.

Capabilities

Configuration and vulnerability scanning via OpenSCAP Base, a NIST-certified CLI tool

Track infrastructure compliance to various SCAP policies through OpenSCAP Daemon

Store historical SCAP scan results in SCAPtimony

Enforce compliance while creating images via OSCAP Anaconda Addon

Pros

Continuous compliance and vulnerability checking

Supports more than 25 standards, including CIS standards

cons

7. The loafer

Prowler is a PyPI project for assessing the security posture of AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments. It can run as a Kubernetes function, an AWS EC2 instance, an Azure VM, or a Google Compute Engine.

Capabilities

Facilitates compliance assessments and audits for standards such as CIS, NIST, CISA, and SOC2

AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes configurations benchmark against custom policies

It has a dashboard for exploring CSPM reports

Pros

Harden the cloud by disabling unnecessary ports, deleting abandoned instances and data stores, and more

Treatment and incident response

cons

Not all clouds are supported

Aggregating results from multiple cloud environments can be difficult due to distributed deployment options

8. Scout wing

Scout Suite is a cloud-based security audit tool to provide timely security risk and configuration assessments. As a CLI tool, Scout Suite easily integrates with multiple cloud environments.

Capabilities

Support for seven cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and DigitalOcean Cloud

Automatically detect cloud threats by scanning for exposed CSP APIs

Brief sketch reports of risks and attacks

Output reports in HTML format

Pros

cons

It does not perform in-depth security posture checks

Does not support compliance management; It only identifies misconfigurations and security risks

The summary reports lack the depth and context needed to accelerate reform efforts

9.S3Scanner

S3Scanner scans S3 buckets in AWS, DigitalOcean, and a host of other providers for misconfigured permissions. It contains a set of tools to manage the security posture of S3 buckets.

Capabilities

Pros

cons

With CSPM

The cloud is vast and limitless, and with multiple components interacting with each other, misconfigurations are inevitable. That's why OSS CSPM tools are cost-effective, highly scalable, and attractive solutions to help organizations detect misconfigurations and keep their cloud standards compliant. However, there is no unique OSS CSPM tool that provides all the core capabilities we discussed above.

Enter Waze. From context-aware scanning and risk prioritization to automated remediation and multi-cloud support, WIZ CSPM is a unified platform that has everything you need. Request a demo today to see how Wiz can solve all of your cloud infrastructure's security vulnerabilities.