gosec - Go Security Checker

Inspects source code for security problems by scanning the Go AST and SSA code representation.

Quick links

• GitHub Action
• Local installation
• Quick start
• Common usage patterns
• Selecting rules
• Output formats

Features

• Pattern-based rules for detecting common security issues in Go code
• SSA-based analyzers for type conversions, slice bounds, and crypto issues
• Taint analysis for tracking data flow from user input to dangerous functions (SQL injection, command injection, path traversal, SSRF, XSS, log injection, SMTP injection, SSTI, unsafe deserialization, open redirect)

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License here.

Project status

Installation

GitHub Action

You can run gosec as a GitHub action as follows:

Use the versioned tag with @master which is pinned to the latest stable release. This will provide a stable behavior.

name: Run Gosec
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  tests:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      GO111MODULE: on
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Source
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Run Gosec Security Scanner
        uses: securego/gosec@master
        with:
          args: ./...

Scanning Projects with Private Modules

If your project imports private Go modules, you need to configure authentication so that gosec can fetch the dependencies. Set the following environment variables in your workflow:

• GOPRIVATE: A comma-separated list of module path prefixes that should be considered private (e.g., github.com/your-org/*).
• GITHUB_AUTHENTICATION_TOKEN: A GitHub token with read access to your private repositories.

name: Run Gosec
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  tests:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      GO111MODULE: on
      GOPRIVATE: github.com/your-org/*
      GITHUB_AUTHENTICATION_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PRIVATE_REPO_TOKEN }}
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Source
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Run Gosec Security Scanner
        uses: securego/gosec@v2
        with:
          args: ./...

Integrating with code scanning

You can integrate third-party code analysis tools with GitHub code scanning by uploading data as SARIF files.

The workflow shows an example of running the gosec as a step in a GitHub action workflow which outputs the results.sarif file. The workflow then uploads the results.sarif file to GitHub using the upload-sarif action.

name: "Security Scan"

# Run workflow each time code is pushed to your repository and on a schedule.
# The scheduled workflow runs every at 00:00 on Sunday UTC time.
on:
  push:
  schedule:
  - cron: '0 0 * * 0'

jobs:
  tests:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      GO111MODULE: on
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Source
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Run Gosec Security Scanner
        uses: securego/gosec@v2
        with:
          # we let the report trigger content trigger a failure using the GitHub Security features.
          args: '-no-fail -fmt sarif -out results.sarif ./...'
      - name: Upload SARIF file
        uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v2
        with:
          # Path to SARIF file relative to the root of the repository
          sarif_file: results.sarif

Go Analysis

The goanalysis package provides a golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis.Analyzer for integration with tools that support the standard Go analysis interface, such as Bazel's nogo framework:

nogo(
    name = "nogo",
    deps = [
        "@com_github_securego_gosec_v2//goanalysis",
        # add more analyzers as needed
    ],
    visibility = ["//visibility:public"],
)

Local Installation

gosec requires Go 1.25 or newer.

go install github.com/securego/gosec/v2/cmd/gosec@latest

Quick start

# Scan all packages in current module
gosec ./...

# Write JSON report
gosec -fmt json -out results.json ./...

# Write SARIF report for code scanning
gosec -fmt sarif -out results.sarif ./...

Exit codes

• 0: scan finished without unsuppressed findings/errors
• 1: at least one unsuppressed finding or processing error
• Use -no-fail to always return 0

Usage

Gosec can be configured to only run a subset of rules, to exclude certain file paths, and produce reports in different formats. By default all rules will be run against the supplied input files. To recursively scan from the current directory you can supply ./... as the input argument.

Available rules

gosec includes rules across these categories:

• G1xx: general secure coding issues (for example hardcoded credentials, unsafe usage, HTTP hardening, cookie security)
• G2xx: injection risks in query/template/command construction
• G3xx: file and path handling risks (permissions, traversal, temp files, archive extraction)
• G4xx: crypto and TLS weaknesses
• G5xx: blocklisted imports
• G6xx: Go-specific correctness/security checks (for example range aliasing and slice bounds)
• G7xx: taint analysis rules (SQL injection, command injection, path traversal, SSRF, XSS, log, SMTP injection, SSTI, unsafe deserialization, and open redirect)

For the full list, rule descriptions, and per-rule configuration, see RULES.md.

Retired rules

• G105: Audit the use of math/big.Int.Exp - CVE is fixed
• G307: Deferring a method which returns an error - causing more inconvenience than fixing a security issue, despite the details from this blog post

Selecting rules

By default, gosec will run all rules against the supplied file paths. It is however possible to select a subset of rules to run via the -include= flag, or to specify a set of rules to explicitly exclude using the -exclude= flag.

# Run a specific set of rules
$ gosec -include=G101,G203,G401 ./...

# Run everything except for rule G303
$ gosec -exclude=G303 ./...

CWE Mapping

Every issue detected by gosec is mapped to a CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) which describes in more generic terms the vulnerability. The exact mapping can be found here.

Configuration

A number of global settings can be provided in a configuration file as follows:

{
    "global": {
        "nosec": "enabled",
        "audit": "enabled"
    }
}

• nosec: this setting will overwrite all #nosec directives defined throughout the code base
• audit: runs in audit mode which enables addition checks that for normal code analysis might be too nosy

# Run with a global configuration file
$ gosec -conf config.json .

Path-Based Rule Exclusions

Large repositories with multiple components may need different security rules for different paths. Use exclude-rules to suppress specific rules for specific paths.

Configuration File:

{
  "exclude-rules": [
    {
      "path": "cmd/.*",
      "rules": ["G204", "G304"]
    },
    {
      "path": "scripts/.*",
      "rules": ["*"]
    }
  ]
}

CLI Flag:

# Exclude G204 and G304 from cmd/ directory
gosec --exclude-rules="cmd/.*:G204,G304" ./...

# Exclude all rules from scripts/ directory  
gosec --exclude-rules="scripts/.*:*" ./...

# Multiple exclusions
gosec --exclude-rules="cmd/.*:G204,G304;test/.*:G101" ./...

Field	Type	Description
path	string (regex)	Regex matched against file paths
rules	[]string	Rule IDs to exclude. * for all

Rule Configuration

Some rules accept configuration flags as well; these flags are documented in RULES.md.

Go version

Some rules require a specific Go version which is retrieved from the Go module file present in the project. If this version cannot be found, it will fallback to Go runtime version.

The Go module version is parsed using the go list command which in some cases might lead to performance degradation. In this situation, the go module version can be easily provided by setting the environment variable GOSECGOVERSION=go1.21.1.

Dependencies

gosec loads packages using Go modules. In most projects, dependencies are resolved automatically during scanning.

If dependencies are missing, run:

go mod tidy
go mod download

Excluding test files and folders

gosec will ignore test files across all packages and any dependencies in your vendor directory.

The scanning of test files can be enabled with the following flag:

gosec -tests ./...

Also additional folders can be excluded as follows:

 gosec -exclude-dir=rules -exclude-dir=cmd ./...

Excluding generated files

gosec can ignore generated go files with default generated code comment.

// Code generated by some generator DO NOT EDIT.

gosec -exclude-generated ./...

Auto fixing vulnerabilities

gosec can suggest fixes based on AI recommendation. It will call an AI API to receive a suggestion for a security finding.

You can enable this feature by providing the following command line arguments:

• ai-api-provider: the name of the AI API provider. Supported providers:
  • Gemini: gemini-3-pro-preview (default), gemini-2.5-pro, gemini-2.5-flash, gemini-2.5-flash-lite
  • Claude: claude-sonnet-4-6 (default), claude-opus-4-7, claude-opus-4-6, claude-sonnet-4-5, claude-opus-4-5, claude-haiku-4-5
  • OpenAI: gpt-5.4 (default), gpt-5.4-mini, gpt-5.4-nano
  • Custom OpenAI-compatible: Any custom model name (requires ai-base-url)
• ai-api-key or set the environment variable GOSEC_AI_API_KEY: the key to access the AI API
  • For Gemini, you can create an API key following these instructions
  • For Claude, get your API key from Anthropic Console
  • For OpenAI, get your API key from OpenAI Platform
• ai-base-url: (optional) custom base URL for OpenAI-compatible APIs (e.g., Azure OpenAI, LocalAI, Ollama)
• ai-skip-ssl: (optional) skip SSL certificate verification for AI API (useful for self-signed certificates)

Examples:

# Using Gemini
gosec -ai-api-provider="gemini-3-pro-preview" \
  -ai-api-key="your_key" ./...

# Using Claude
gosec -ai-api-provider="claude-sonnet-4-6" \
  -ai-api-key="your_key" ./...

# Using OpenAI
gosec -ai-api-provider="gpt-5.4" \
  -ai-api-key="your_key" ./...

# Using Azure OpenAI
gosec -ai-api-provider="gpt-5.4" \
  -ai-api-key="your_azure_key" \
  -ai-base-url="https://your-resource.openai.azure.com/openai/deployments/your-deployment" \
  ./...

# Using local Ollama with custom model
gosec -ai-api-provider="llama3.2" \
  -ai-base-url="http://localhost:11434/v1" \
  ./...

# Using self-signed certificate API
gosec -ai-api-provider="custom-model" \
  -ai-api-key="your_key" \
  -ai-base-url="https://internal-api.company.com/v1" \
  -ai-skip-ssl \
  ./...

Annotating code

As with all automated detection tools, there will be cases of false positives. In cases where gosec reports a failure that has been manually verified as being safe, it is possible to annotate the code with a comment that starts with #nosec.

The #nosec comment should have the format #nosec [RuleList] [-- Justification].

The #nosec comment needs to be placed on the line where the warning is reported.

func main() {
	tr := &http.Transport{
		TLSClientConfig: &tls.Config{
			InsecureSkipVerify: true, // #nosec G402
		},
	}

	client := &http.Client{Transport: tr}
	_, err := client.Get("https://go.dev/")
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}
}

When a specific false positive has been identified and verified as safe, you may wish to suppress only that single rule (or a specific set of rules) within a section of code, while continuing to scan for other problems. To do this, you can list the rule(s) to be suppressed within the #nosec annotation, e.g: /* #nosec G401 */ or //#nosec G201 G202 G203

You could put the description or justification text for the annotation. The justification should be after the rule(s) to suppress and start with two or more dashes, e.g: //#nosec G101 G102 -- This is a false positive

Alternatively, gosec also supports the //gosec:disable directive, which functions similar to #nosec:

//gosec:disable G101 -- This is a false positive

In some cases you may also want to revisit places where #nosec or //gosec:disable annotations have been used. To run the scanner and ignore any #nosec annotations you can do the following:

gosec -nosec=true ./...

Tracking suppressions

As described above, we could suppress violations externally (using -include/-exclude) or inline (using #nosec annotations). Suppression metadata can be emitted for auditing.

Enable suppression tracking with -track-suppressions:

gosec -track-suppressions -exclude=G101 \
  -fmt=sarif -out=results.sarif ./...

• For external suppressions, gosec records suppression info where kind is external and justification is Globally suppressed..
• For inline suppressions, gosec records suppression info where kind is inSource and justification is the text after two or more dashes in the comment.

Note: Only SARIF and JSON formats support tracking suppressions.

Build tags

gosec is able to pass your Go build tags to the analyzer. They can be provided as a comma separated list as follows:

gosec -tags debug,ignore ./...

Output formats

gosec supports text, json, yaml, csv, junit-xml, html, sonarqube, golint, and sarif. By default, results will be reported to stdout, but can also be written to an output file. The output format is controlled by the -fmt flag, and the output file is controlled by the -out flag as follows:

# Write output in json format to results.json
$ gosec -fmt=json -out=results.json *.go

Use -stdout to print results while also writing -out. Use -verbose to override stdout format while preserving the file format.

# Write output in json format to results.json as well as stdout
$ gosec -fmt=json -out=results.json -stdout *.go

# Overrides the output format to 'text' when stdout the results,
# while writing it to results.json
$ gosec -fmt=json -out=results.json -stdout -verbose=text *.go

Note: gosec generates the generic issue import format for SonarQube, and a report has to be imported into SonarQube using sonar.externalIssuesReportPaths=path/to/gosec-report.json.

Common usage patterns

# Fail only on medium+ severity findings
gosec -severity medium ./...

# Fail only on medium+ confidence findings
gosec -confidence medium ./...

# Exclude specific rules for specific paths
gosec --exclude-rules="cmd/.*:G204,G304;scripts/.*:*" ./...

# Exclude generated files in scan
gosec -exclude-generated ./...

# Include test files in scan
gosec -tests ./...

Development

Development documentation was moved to DEVELOPMENT.md.

Who is using gosec?

This is a list with some of the gosec's users.

Sponsors

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