Setting Up the Local VM Scanner on Linux

Aikido VM Scanner is a single-package that installs on your system, automatically scanning and identifying dependencies to provide a detailed view into your environment.

Prerequisites

• Minimum system requirements: at least 1GB RAM.
• Preferred system requirements: at least 2GB RAM and 4 CPUs.
• Ensure you have sudo / admin privileges on your system
• Make sure to use the appropriate commands for your system or cloud provider
• If you need to run with root, place the AIKIDO_TOKEN env var after sudo, like this: sudo AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME <install_command>

Installation and Upgrade

Make sure you run as sudo and replace AIKIDO_TOKEN with valid token from Local VM scanning page in Aikido. To specify the VM environment (that you will see later in Aikido), you can also set the VM_TYPE variable as one of: production, staging or development.

The VM Scanner Agent runs once a day, at a random time between 4:00 AM - 8:00 AM (machine time).

After install, a first scan will start automatically. If you want to run it on demand, you can manually execute:

/opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner

For Red Hat-based Systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora)

x86_64

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm
MD5	0cba911e55b41766952d9d5390bb5cf9
SHA256	ed47754b8b0897ac49425e231ec91592dbc91e1aab1d98cf3cbbbb73a9d6ab1d

aarch64

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner.aarch64.rpm

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.aarch64.rpm
MD5	6cecc3da8dd6072402585f631855baa0
SHA256	13ba77be9e682fca3be8e6879e4c0165d6474651110692ae9dc85361a71ae5d6

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

We support Debian >= 10 and Ubuntu >= 20.04.

x86_64

curl -L -O https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb
AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production apt-get install -y ./aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb
MD5	e2ee97a353152f5818c095f862962ed2
SHA256	d0337239b3b0de4276b8bbaab3066c935eff39b9666ea40ad062972631777831

aarch64

curl -L -O https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb
AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production apt-get install -y ./aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb
MD5	188ab30e97d5a099af384e10b6ce7f15
SHA256	078e0af8c93adcf59e967debadbef05c5e3547618d57fa8b3236b8932a553f5d

Latest version

If you have an automated install process and you always want to be on the latest version as soon as we release it, you can replace the version in the install link with latest:

• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm
• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.aarch64.rpm
• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb
• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb

Additional Configuration

Token setup

If for any reason you can't set the AIKIDO_TOKEN at install time, you can set the token post install in one of two ways:

• Paste the token in /opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.4.8/.token
• Change the contents of /opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.4.8/config.json :

{
    "api_key": "AIKIDO_TOKEN_HERE",
    "exclude": []
}

Hostname change

By default, we automatically get the hostname for the scanned machine and submit that to Aikido, in order to be displayed in the Virtual Machines tab.

If you want to change the reported hostname, you can do that using the configuration file:

{
    "hostname": "YOUR_HOSTNAME_HERE",
    "exclude": []
}

Exclude files or paths

In the config.json you can exclude files and paths by adding additional items to the exclude list. You can find some examples below.

• Exclude a single file in a directory:

{
    "exclude": [
        ...
        "./home/testing/app/package.json",
    ]
}

• Exclude all releases subdirectories:

{
    "exclude": [
            ...
            "./home/testing/*/releases",
    ]
}

• Exclude all .json files in the out folder and all subdirectories:

{
    "exclude": [
        ...
        "./out/**/*.json",
    ]
}

• Exclude catalogers from scanning (eg: exclude Golang catalogers):

{
    "exclude": [
    ],
    "select_catalogers": "-go"
}

Output channel

If you want to control the output channel of the VM scanner, when installing you can specify the OUTPUT variable as stdout, stderr or none.

Example for rpm x86_64:

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production OUTPUT=stderr dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

This option does not affect the disk logs. These are created no matter what this setting is.

Disable initial scan

When a rpm/deb package is installed, it automatically triggers an initial scan. If you want to disable this feature, you can set the INITIAL_SCAN parameter to 0 at install time, like this:

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME INITIAL_SCAN=0 dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

CLI parameters

If for any reason you need to start the scanning on demand via the command line, you can specify the following CLI parameters to be used for that scan:

  --api-key string
        API key for authentication
  --hostname string
        Hostname of the machine
  --select-catalogers string
        Comma-separated list of catalogers to use or remove
  --vm-type string
        Type of the virtual machine

These CLI parameters take precedence over those specified in config.json.

We trigger an automatic scan once per day and those scans will still use the configuration file and not the CLI parameters, so it is always preferred to place these in config.json.

• Example for setting a custom hostname via CLI:

/opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner --hostname "My Custom VM"

• Example for excluding Golang catalogers via CLI:

/opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.4.8/aikido-vm-scanner --select-catalogers "-go"

Uninstall

Manual uninstall

For Red Hat-based Systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora)

dnf remove -y aikido-vm-scanner

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

apt-get remove -y aikido-vm-scanner

Logs

Logs are available here, along with the last generated SBOM: /var/log/aikido-vm-scanner-1.4.8