sigmalint

Created and maintained by Nishant Tyagi.

ESLint-style linter for Sigma detection rules. Validates against Sigma 2.1.0, scores rules across six quality dimensions, and emits findings with stable rule IDs that you can cite, suppress, or tune.

Why sigmalint

Detection teams routinely ship Sigma rules through pull requests, but existing tooling stops at schema validity. SigmaHQ's sigma-cli check and pySigma verify that a rule parses; they don't measure whether it is well-attributed (MITRE ATT&CK alignment), free of common false-positive patterns, redundant with existing public rules, or stylistically consistent. sigmalint fills that gap with 22 deterministic quality checks across six dimensions, designed to run on every PR — the same way ESLint runs on JavaScript or RuboCop runs on Ruby.

Quickstart

pip install sigmalint-cli
sigmalint lint rules/

The PyPI package is named sigmalint-cli because the bare name sigmalint was already taken by an unrelated project. The CLI binary, the Python import (import sigmalint), and the GitHub repository are all named sigmalint.

Example output:

                                sigmalint 0.1.4
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ file                    ┃ status ┃ score ┃ findings ┃ top findings           ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ rules/win_susp_foo.yml  │ valid  │  95.8 │ 9        │ FP001 (warning), FP003 │
│                         │        │       │          │ (warning), META001a    │
│                         │        │       │          │ (warning), +6 more     │
└─────────────────────────┴────────┴───────┴──────────┴────────────────────────┘
files=1 valid=1 invalid=0 findings=9 errors=0 warnings=7 info=2 mean_score=95.82

Every finding has a stable rule ID. sigmalint explain <ID> prints the full rule documentation — what it checks, why it matters, bad/good examples, and the fix:

$ sigmalint explain FP001
---
id: FP001
dimension: fp_risk
default_severity: warning
profiles: { strict: warning, sigmahq: warning, local: warning }
---

# FP001 — Single broad selection with no filter

## What it checks
The rule's `detection.condition` is a single, unfiltered selection that
references only one wide-matching predicate (e.g. just `selection`
matching a common process name).

## Why
Such rules typically generate high-volume noise in production
deployments.

## Bad example
detection:
  selection: { Image|endswith: '\powershell.exe' }
  condition: selection

## Good example
detection:
  selection: { Image|endswith: '\powershell.exe' }
  filter:    { ParentImage|endswith: ['\explorer.exe', '\cmd.exe'] }
  condition: selection and not filter

## How to fix
Add a negated `filter`/`filter_*` selector that excludes the common
benign cases, or narrow the selection.

What it checks

A strict validity gate (Sigma 2.1.0 JSON schema + condition parser) plus six quality dimensions with 22 rules:

• ATK### — MITRE ATT&CK technique alignment (4 rules)
• TAX### — Sigma taxonomy and modifier correctness (3 rules)
• FP### — false-positive risk heuristics (4 rules)
• META### — metadata completeness (6 rules)
• RED### — redundancy with the public SigmaHQ corpus (2 rules)
• STY### — Sigma interoperability style (3 rules)

Run sigmalint list-rules for the full catalog; sigmalint explain <ID> for per-rule documentation.

In CI

- uses: ni5h4nt/sigmalint@v0   # floating major tag; tracks the latest 0.x release
  with:
    path: rules/
    format: github
    fail-on: error
    min-score: 90

format: github annotates findings inline on PRs via workflow commands. Other formats: text (default), json, sarif.

Profiles

Three built-in profiles tune the rule set for different contexts:

Profile	Intent
strict	Maximum policy enforcement; treats every quality signal as actionable
sigmahq (default)	Match SigmaHQ submission expectations
local	Internal corpus where ids/authors aren't shared and naming is org-specific

Override per rule via .sigmalintrc.yml. See docs/profiles.md.

Configuration

.sigmalintrc.yml in your repo root, all keys optional:

profile: sigmahq
target_sigma_version: 2.1.0   # reserved; multi-version arrives in v0.3
disable: [RED001]
severities:
  TAX003: warning
weights:
  dimensions:
    redundancy: 0.10
fail_on: error
min_score: 90

See docs/configuration.md for the full schema.

Compared to other Sigma tooling

• sigma-cli / pySigma — schema validation and rule → SIEM conversion. Verify that a rule is well-formed; do not measure quality dimensions.
• SigmaHQ contribution pipeline — quality checks specific to the public-repo submission process (filename conventions, references URL liveness, license markers). Specialized to that workflow; not portable to internal corpora.
• yaraQA — comparable concept for the sibling YARA rule format. sigmalint applies the same idea to Sigma.

sigmalint is the only tool that scores Sigma rules across multiple quality dimensions with stable, citeable rule IDs.

Validation

sigmalint has been empirically evaluated against the full SigmaHQ public corpus: 3,132 production detection rules from SigmaHQ/sigma at Sigma v2.1.0, with a mean target-rule recall of 0.993. External-corpus smoke tests also run weekly in CI. The framework and empirical results are documented in Static Quality Assessment of Sigma Detection Rules: Framework and Empirical Evaluation (SSRN, also via DOI).

The project is citable as software via DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20371168 (see CITATION.cff), and PyPI releases ship with Sigstore build-provenance attestations via Trusted Publishing.

Roadmap

• v0.2 — additional rule formats (Splunk SPL detections, Elastic detection rules), expanded false-positive heuristics, optional AI-assisted rule explanations.
• v0.3 — multi-version Sigma support (1.0.x / 2.0.x / 2.1.x), benchmark dataset integration.
• v1.0 — stable rule IDs guaranteed across releases, language plugin API for adding new rule formats out-of-tree.

Documentation

• docs/architecture.md — layered design, condition parser, validity gate
• docs/scoring.md — validity gate + weighted quality scoring
• docs/profiles.md — per-profile rule severities
• docs/configuration.md — config schema
• docs/versioning.md — semver policy and rule-ID stability
• docs/maintainers.md — release process and spec-update playbook
• docs/rules/<ID>.md — per-rule pages (also surfaced by sigmalint explain)

Contributing

The headline contribution path is adding a new lint rule — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the four-step contract (rule class, fixtures, parametrize entry, doc page). Issues use a structured new rule proposal template.

Citation

If you use sigmalint in research, cite via the Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20371168 (concept DOI — always resolves to the latest archived version) or via CITATION.cff.

This implementation accompanies a forthcoming paper, Static Quality Assessment of Sigma Detection Rules: Framework and Empirical Evaluation (preprint pending).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by SigmaHQ or The MITRE Corporation. Sigma is a project of SigmaHQ. ATT&CK® is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.