Cloud Native Runtime Security.
Want to talk? Join us on the #falco channel in the Kubernetes Slack.
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The Falco Project, originally created by Sysdig, is an incubating CNCF open source cloud native runtime security tool. Falco makes it easy to consume kernel events, and enrich those events with information from Kubernetes and the rest of the cloud native stack. Falco can also be extended to other data sources by using plugins. Falco has a rich set of security rules specifically built for Kubernetes, Linux, and cloud-native. If a rule is violated in a system, Falco will send an alert notifying the user of the violation and its severity.
Falco can detect and alert on any behavior that involves making Linux system calls. Falco alerts can be triggered by the use of specific system calls, their arguments, and by properties of the calling process. For example, Falco can easily detect incidents including but not limited to:
- A shell is running inside a container or pod in Kubernetes.
- A container is running in privileged mode, or is mounting a sensitive path, such as
/proc, from the host. - A server process is spawning a child process of an unexpected type.
- Unexpected read of a sensitive file, such as
/etc/shadow. - A non-device file is written to
/dev. - A standard system binary, such as
ls, is making an outbound network connection. - A privileged pod is started in a Kubernetes cluster.
The official Falco rules are maintained and released in falcosecurity/rules. That repository also contains the Falco rules inventory document, which provides additional details around the default rules Falco ships with.
If you would like to run Falco in production please adhere to the official installation guide.
| Tool | Link | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Helm | Chart Repository | The Falco community offers regular helm chart releases. |
| Minikube | Tutorial | The Falco driver has been baked into minikube for easy deployment. |
| Kind | Tutorial | Running Falco with kind requires a driver on the host system. |
| GKE | Tutorial | We suggest using the eBPF driver for running Falco on GKE. |
Falco is designed to be extensible such that it can be built into cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
Falco has a gRPC endpoint and an API defined in protobuf. The Falco Project supports various SDKs for this endpoint.
| Language | Repository |
|---|---|
| Go | client-go |
Falco comes with a plugin framework that extends it to potentially any cloud detection scenario. Plugins are shared libraries that conform to a documented API and allow for:
- Adding new event sources that can be used in rules;
- Adding the ability to define new fields and extract information from events.
The Falco Project maintains various plugins and provides SDKs for plugin development.
| Language | Repository |
|---|---|
| Go | falcosecurity/plugin-sdk-go |
The Official Documentation is the best resource to learn about Falco.
To get involved with The Falco Project please visit the community repository to find more.
How to reach out?
- Join the #falco channel on the Kubernetes Slack
- Join the Falco mailing list
- Read the Falco documentation
See the contributing guide and the code of conduct.
A third party security audit was performed by Cure53, you can see the full report here.
Please report security vulnerabilities following the community process documented here.
Falco is licensed to you under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
The falcosecurity/evolution repository is the official space for the community to work together, discuss ideas, and document processes. It is also a place to make decisions. Check it out to find more helpful resources.