Stave

Open-source cloud configuration verifier. Proves your AWS configuration is correct instead of searching for what's wrong. It works offline without any credentials.

Documentation · Control Reference · Command Reference · How-to Guides · Integrations

Install

go install github.com/sufield/stave/cmd/stave@latest

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/sufield/stave.git && cd stave && make build

For zero-setup options, click Open in GitHub Codespaces above, or see stave-workspace/README.md for Coder workspaces and Docker.

Quick Start

# Evaluate a snapshot against the built-in catalog
stave apply --observations ./my-snapshot/

# Discover attack chains across IAM, data, and audit surfaces
stave export-sir --format jsonl --output facts.jsonl
make chain-discover ARGS="-snapshot observations/"

# Try a demo (zero AWS access required)
bash examples/demo-ai-security/run.sh

Snapshots

Stave evaluates local JSON snapshots, not live APIs. Capture once, evaluate anywhere — offline, deterministic, auditable.

The contract and evaluation are always deterministic. The collection method is your choice based on your risk posture:

Profile	Capture path	LLM involved?	Details
Risk-averse / regulated	Bundled collector or pre-built jq filters	No	Capture guide
Pragmatic / local LLMs	LLM maps raw JSON to the contract, then deterministic eval	Local LLM only	Extractor prompt
Stave contributors	LLM writes jq filters, team reviews, filters ship in repo	Development tool	Import methods

Quick Start

1. Capture raw AWS data and transform it:

bash scripts/aws-snapshot.sh ./my-snapshot

This runs read-only AWS CLI calls (Get*, List*, Describe*), saves raw JSON to my-snapshot/raw/, then calls stave transform to produce obs.v0.1 observations in my-snapshot/observations/. Requires AWS CLI, jq, and SecurityAudit credentials. Full IAM policy details →

2. Evaluate:

stave apply --observations ./my-snapshot/observations/

3. Read your findings.

What services are supported? stave transform --coverage lists the AWS API shapes with embedded filters.

What fields does a service need? stave contract show --asset-type aws_iam_role shows every property path the catalog reads.

Why snapshots? Evaluation never calls AWS APIs. Your security data stays local. You can capture from one machine, evaluate on another, and diff across time. How the snapshot model works →

All capture methods: Bundled script, Steampipe, AWS CLI + jq, LLM-assisted mapping, or any tool that produces obs.v0.1 JSON. Import methods →

Onboarding skills (internal/_skills/)

Six executable skills guide you from install to real-environment evaluation. Each skill is a markdown file your AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor) can read and execute — or you can follow manually.

#	Skill	Time	AWS needed?
1	_setup	5 min	No
2	first-evaluation	10 min	No
3	lab-validation	30 min	Sandbox ($0)
4	write-your-first-control	20 min	No
5	reasoning-engines	30 min	No
6	snapshot-your-account	30 min	Yes (read-only)

Assessment Templates

Templates are JTBD bundles — everything needed to run a specific security assessment job. Instead of assembling controls, chains, and parameters manually, pick a template and go.

# Zero arguments — sensible defaults (critical-findings template,
# severity_threshold=high, writes stave-values.yaml)
stave template init

# Run the assessment
stave apply --values ./stave-values.yaml --snapshot ./observations/

Arguments are overrides, not requirements:

# Override the template type
stave template init independent-audit

# Override a parameter
stave template init --param severity_threshold=critical

# See which template fits your snapshot
stave recommend --snapshot ./observations/

Built-in templates

Template	Job	Priority
critical-findings	Surface critical/high findings for whatever services are in the snapshot	10 (default)
independent-audit	Broad-scope audit across all services	30
m-and-a-diligence	Due-diligence posture snapshot for acquisitions	50
breach-reconstruction	Timeline reconstruction after a security incident	60
bucket-hijacking-assessment	Evaluate router-to-S3 destination bindings for namespace hijacking	70

critical-findings is the default — zero arguments selects it. It dynamically selects controls based on which services appear in your snapshot. No configuration needed; if the catalog has IAM controls and your snapshot has IAM resources, those controls run. Adding a new service to the catalog automatically expands coverage.

Filtered output

When a severity threshold hides findings, eval reports what was hidden:

23 findings at high/critical severity
41 additional findings at medium/low/info severity (hidden)

To include all: set severity_threshold to info in stave-values.yaml

Parameter validation

stave template init validates parameter values against allowed options at init time. Invalid values are rejected immediately:

Error: invalid value "super-critical" for parameter severity_threshold
  Allowed values: critical, high, medium, low, info

Custom templates

# Scaffold a new template
stave template new my-org-assessment

# Edit template.yaml — set controls, chains, recommend_when predicate
# Run and verify
stave template verify my-org-assessment

Custom templates in ./stave-templates/ are discovered automatically alongside built-in templates. stave template eject forks a built-in template for local customization.

Why not a scanner?

CSPM tools scan for known-bad patterns. Stave verifies that invariants hold — deterministic, reproducible, mathematically grounded. The word is verifier, not scanner: proof, not heuristics.

Your AI agent has admin access. Your CSPM tool says you're compliant.

bash examples/demo-ai-security/run.sh

A Bedrock agent with broad Lambda invoke + no guardrail + a Lambda tool that reaches a PHI-tagged S3 bucket is the canonical AI compound failure mode: every component-level check passes.

• Encryption ✅
• VPC ✅
• Model allowlist ✅
• Public access blocked ✅

The dashboard is green. Stave's compound chains compose those individually-passing settings into the attack story they describe — agent → Lambda → S3 PHI, no audit trail.

AI surface coverage spans Bedrock (agent, guardrail, model, logging) and SageMaker (training, notebook, pipeline, endpoint) with compound chains across both. Every AI control maps to the OWASP Non-Human Identity (NHI) Top 10 — see docs/compliance/owasp-nhi-top10.md.

	CSPM tools	Cloud configuration verifier
Approach	Search for known-bad patterns	Prove properties hold for all inputs
Scope	Check individual resources	Compute all paths through the relationship graph
Method	Sample and alert	Evaluate deterministically with a witness
Access	Require credentials + runtime access	Operate on an artifact, offline, credential-free
Trust	Findings you trust on faith	Findings you can independently re-derive

Stave doesn't replace your scanner. It finds what your scanner structurally cannot — the compound risks that exist in the relationships between individually-correct configurations.

Catalog at a glance

• Built-in controls across S3, IAM, VPC, EC2, RDS, Lambda, ECS, EKS, CloudTrail, KMS, OpenSearch, SageMaker, Bedrock, Cognito, and more.
• Ghost-reference controls — cross-inventory detection of pointers to deleted resources (IAM → role, agent → Lambda, CNAME → S3 bucket). Single-resource scanners can't see absence.
• Compound chain definitions — multi-step attack paths across identity, data, audit, and recovery surfaces, including AI agent identity (Bedrock + Lambda + S3 PHI, RAG → PHI, notebook → prod role).
• Compliance profiles — HIPAA, CIS AWS v3.0, SOC 2, PCI-DSS v4.0, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, GDPR, FFIEC, ISO 27001, NIST CSF 2.0.

Current counts in docs/metrics.yaml.

How Controls Are Built

Every control in the catalog traces to a documented security failure such as HackerOne disclosures, public breach postmortems, AWS security advisories, Mandiant/GTIG incident reports, and offensive tool prerequisites extracted from Stratus Red Team, Pacu, and CloudFox source code. Supply-side: exhaustive API surface diffing against botocore response schemas, cross-cloud transposition from CIS Azure/GCP benchmarks, and formal policy-semantics analysis grounded in AWS's own Zelkova research.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, development workflow, and PR guidelines.

License

Apache License 2.0