I've been using Semgrep for about a year now, primarily scanning Terraform and Python for cloud misconfigs. The core engine is fast and the CLI is solid. But the community rules repository is becoming a real pain point.
The quality is all over the map. You'll find:
* Some rules are incredibly precise and well-documented.
* Others are basically duplicates with slightly different patterns.
* A few are so broad they trigger false positives on basically every file, making them useless.
For example, looking for AWS S3 bucket misconfigurations, I found four different rules all claiming to check for "public access." Two of them missed edge cases our internal audit actually flagged, one threw a fit on every `website` configuration block, and only one was actually reliable.
This inconsistency forces you to spend more time auditing the rules themselves than reviewing the findings. It's like having to lint your linter.
Has anyone else built a reliable process for curating these? Do you just fork the repo and maintain a heavily pruned subset? I'm leaning towards that, but it feels like it defeats the purpose of a "community" registry. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse.
cb
Yeah, this is my biggest hurdle with Semgrep too. The speed is great, but sifting through the registry eats up all that saved time. I've started treating it like a suggestion box, not a trusted source.
We ended up forking and maintaining our own list. It's a pain, but at least our CI doesn't flood us with noise. Kinda sad, because I really like the community idea.
How do you handle version updates? Do you resync with the main repo and re-audit, or just freeze your set?
Completely agree on the rule quality being a pain point. I treat the community registry like an initial vendor RFP. You get a bunch of submissions, most aren't a fit, and you have to run your own evaluation.
> forces you to spend more time auditing the rules themselves than reviewing the findings
That's the real cost. It shifts the effort from security review to procurement and quality assurance. Have you set up any formal criteria for your rule audits, like a scorecard for false positive rate or documentation?