Assessing the adoption of security policies by developers in terraform across different cloud providers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cloud computing has become popular thanks to the widespread use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, allowing the community to manage and configure cloud infrastructure using scripts. However, the scripting process does not automatically prevent practitioners from introducing misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, or privacy risks. As a result, ensuring security relies on practitioners’ understanding and the adoption of explicit policies. To understand how practitioners deal with this problem, we perform an empirical study analyzing the adoption of scripted security best practices present in Terraform files, applied on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. We assess the adoption of these practices by analyzing a sample of 812 open-source GitHub projects. We scan each project’s configuration files, looking for policy implementation through static analysis (Checkov and Tfsec). The category Access policy emerges as the most widely adopted in all providers, while Encryption at rest presents the most neglected policies. Regarding the cloud providers, we observe that AWS and Azure present similar behavior regarding attended and neglected policies. Finally, we provide guidelines for cloud practitioners to limit infrastructure vulnerability and discuss further aspects associated with policies that have yet to be extensively embraced within the industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.088 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".