Note: This repository is in prototype phase and under active development with subject to breaking changes.

Ansible Policy

Ansible Policy is a prototype implementation which allows us to define and set constraints to the Ansible project in OPA Rego language. The key features of Ansible Policy are

• Ansible project is auto scanned as objects and accessible from OPA policy (using ARI project scanning internally).
• Ansible knowledge base acquired from external sources such as Galaxy can be used from OPA policy.
• Multiple policy resolution from the scanned Ansible content.
• Policies can be packed as an ansible collection.
• Users can define policy in YAML format (policybook). It can be auto-transformed with PolicyTranspiler.

Getting started

1. Install opa command

refer to OPA document

2. git clone

clone this repository

3. Install ansbile-policy command

Ansible Policy requires Python 3.11 or later. Please install it before this step.

The following command installs ansible-policy command and dependency packages.

$ cd ansible-policy
$ pip install -e .

4. Prepare Policybook

As examples, the following policybooks can be found in the examples/check_project/policies directory.

• check_package_policy yml: Check if only authorized packages are installed.
• check_collection_policy yml: Check if only authorized collections are used
• check_become_policy yml: check if become: true is used and check if only trusted user is used

ansible-policy transpile these policybooks into OPA policy automatically and evaluate the policies.

See this doc about Policybook specification.

5. Running policy evaluation on a playbook

The example playbook has some tasks that violate the 3 policies above.

ansible-policy can report these violations like the following.

$ ansible-policy -p examples/check_project/playbook.yml --policy-dir examples/check_project/policies

From the result, you can see the details on violations.

• The task "Install Unauthorized App" is installing a package unauthorized-app with a root permission by using become: true. This is not listed in the allowed packages defined in the policybook check_package_policy. Also the privilege escalation is detected by the policybook check_become_policy.

• The task "Set MySQL root password" is using a collection community.mysql which is not in the allowed list, and this is detected by the policybook check_collection_policy.

Alternatively, you can output the evaluation result in a JSON format.

$ ansible-policy -p examples/check_project/playbook.yml --policy-dir examples/check_project/policies --format json > agk-result.json

Then you would get the JSON file like the following.

The summary section in the JSON is a summary of the evaluation results such as the number of total policies, the number of policies with one or more violations, total files and OK/NG for each of them.

For example, you can get a summary about files by jq command like this.

$ cat agk-result.json | jq .summary.files
{
  "total": 1,
  "validated": 0,
  "not_validated": 1,
  "list": [
    "examples/check_project/playbook.yml"
  ]
}

The files section contains the details for each file evaluation result.

Each file result has results per policy, and a policy result contains multiple results for policy evaluation targets like tasks or plays.

For example, you can use this detailed data by the following commands.

# get overall result for a file
$ cat /tmp/agk-result.json | jq .files[0].violation
true

# get overall result for the second policy for the file
$ cat /tmp/agk-result.json | jq .files[0].policies[1].violation
true

# get an policy result for the second task in the file for the second policy
cat /tmp/agk-result.json | jq .files[0].policies[1].targets[1]
{
  "name": "Install nginx [installing unauthorized pkg]",
  "lines": {
    "begin": 31,
    "end": 36
  },
  "validated": false,
  "message": "privilage escalation is detected. allowed users are one of [\"trusted_user\"]\n"
}

6. (OPTIONAL) Prepare your configuration file

Instead of specifying the policy directory, you can define a configuration for ansible-policy like the following.

[policy]
default disabled
policies.org.compliance   tag=compliance  enabled

[source]
policies.org.compliance    = examples/check_project    # org-wide compliance policy

policy field is a configuration like iptable to enable/disable installed policies. Users can use tag for configuring this in detail.

source field is a list of module packages and their source like ansible-galaxy or local directory. ansible-policy installs policies based on this configuration.

The example above is configured to enable the 3 policies in step 4.

You can check the example config file as reference.

Policy check for Event streams

Ansible Policy supports policy checks for runtime events output from ansible-runner.

ansible-runner generates the events while playbook execution. For example, "playbook_on_start" is an event at the start of the playbook execution, and "runner_on_ok" is the one for a task that is completed successfully.

event_handler.py is a reference implementation to handle these runner events that are input by standard input and it outputs policy evaluation results to standard output like the following image.

In the example above, a policybook here is used.

An event JSON data and its attributes are accessible by input.xxxx in the policybook condition field.

For example, the changed status of a task is input.event_data.changed, so the example policy is checking if input.event_data.changed as one of the conditions.

You can implement your policy conditions by using input.xxxx.

Also, you can use event_handler.py, in particular, the code block below to implement your event handler depending on the way to receive events.

    evaluator = PolicyEvaluator(policy_dir="/path/to/your_policy_dir")
    formatter = ResultFormatter(format_type="event_stream")
    # `load_event()` here should be replaced with your generator to read a single event
    for event in load_event():
        result = evaluator.run(
            eval_type="event",
            event=event,
        )
        formatter.print(result)