CircleCI for CI/CD pipeline scans - Administrator Guide - Cortex Cloud Posture Management - Cortex CLOUD

Cortex Cloud Posture Management Documentation

Product
Cortex Cloud Application Security > Cortex CLOUD
License
Cloud Posture Management
Creation date
2025-01-22
Last date published
2026-06-04
Category
Administrator Guide

Integrate Cortex Cloud Application Security CI/CD Security with your CircleCI system to enable automated and continuous scanning of your CI/CD pipelines. This integration provides proactive security checks, triggered by pipeline events or configuration changes, ensuring security issues are detected and remediated throughout the entire deployment lifecycle.

Pipeline scans are executed using the Cortex CLI, and include automated actions based on scan results to enforce security policies and prevent vulnerable deployments.

Note

  • This integration utilizes a Personal Access Token (PAT) for authentication

  • CircleCI onboarding offers both code and CI/CD scanning. A single integrated instance supports either code or CI scanning, but not both. If you require both code and CI scanning for your CircleCi environment, you must create two separate integrations, selecting the appropriate scanning type for each. To onboard CircleCI for code scans, refer to CircleCI for code scans

Prerequisite

Before you begin:

  • CircleCI user requirements:

    • Permissions: To enable Cortex Cloud visibility for all CircleCI projects, a version control system (VCS) user with integration permissions must be authorized (For example, Organization Owner permissions are required to onboard GitHub SaaS, while in GitLab SaaS you must be a Maintainer). This is because CircleCI's user base integrates with the VCS, inheriting its user permissions. For example, if a GitHub user has access to specific organizations and repositories, these entities are visible and available in CircleCI

    • Best practice: Create a dedicated VCS user to integrate CircleCI with Cortex Cloud, to prevent the integration breaking if the user leaves the organization

    • Ensure that the dedicated user follows all the organization’s projects in CircleCI

    • Create a personal API token in CircleCI (see step 1 below). This is required to allow reading the configurations from CircleCI for all projects the user has access to

Onboarding steps
  1. Generate a personal API token on CircleCI.

    1. Login to your CircleCI instance with your VCS user credentials.

    2. Create and save a personal API token. For more information about CircleCI tokens, refer to https://circleci.com/docs/managing-api-tokens/#creating-a-personal-api-token.

  2. On the Cortex Cloud console:

    1. Search for and hover over CircleCI and click Add, or Add Another Instance if an instance is already onboarded.

    2. On the Select Integration step of the integration wizard, select CI/CD System ScanNext.

    3. On the Enable CI/CD system scanning step of the integration wizard:

      1. Enter an instance name: This can be any name you choose; it serves as an alias for your integration.

      2. Paste the CircleCI personal API token that you generated in step 1 aboveDone.

    4. Verify that the Instance Successfully Created message is displayed in the last step of the wizard and click Close.

  3. Verify integration and confirm that the your integrated CircleCI instance has a status of Connected.

    1. On the Data Sources & Integrations page, locate CircleCI.

    2. Hover over and select the resulting entry.

    3. Locate your CircleCI instance and verify that the status is Connected and that Pipeline Risks is the instance type.

  4. Next step: View scan results and mitigate issues.

Manage data source integrations

Manage integrations to align with evolving requirements and ensure they remain current.

  1. Navigate to SettingsData Sources & Integrations and use the Vendor filter to located the required integration.

  2. Select your vendor from the list.

    The integrated instances for the selected vendor are displayed.

  3. Right-click on an instance and select an option:

    • Edit instance: Redirects to the Select Repositories step of the integration wizard, where you can modify configurations for the selected instance. For more details, refer to the relevant integration guide

    • Delete instance: When confirmed, deletes the instance, including data from previous scans

    • Copy entire row – Copies all column values for the selected row to the clipboard.