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Security

The Semgrep Logo and What Semgrep Actually Does

Looking for the Semgrep logo often means you are evaluating Semgrep the tool. Here is what the brand mark represents and how the static analysis engine works.

Yukti Singhal
Platform Engineer
6 min read

People searching for the Semgrep logo are usually one of two audiences: a developer building a security dashboard who needs the official brand mark, or an engineer evaluating Semgrep the static analysis tool and using the logo search as a shortcut to the product. This guide covers both. The short version on the mark: Semgrep's logo is a wordmark with a stylized green motif, and the official, correctly colored assets live in Semgrep's own brand and press resources, which is the only place you should pull them from. The longer and more useful version is what the tool behind the logo actually does, because that is what most people are really trying to figure out.

Using the logo correctly

If you need the Semgrep logo for a legitimate purpose, a comparison page, an integration listing, a talk about your security stack, get it from the vendor's official brand assets rather than scraping a favicon or a low-resolution image off a blog. Vendor brand pages publish the mark in the correct colors, with clear-space rules and light and dark variants, and they state what you are and are not allowed to do with it. The common mistakes are recoloring the mark to fit your palette, stretching it, or placing it on a clashing background, all of which most trademark usage guidelines forbid.

Two practical notes. First, do not imply endorsement: showing a tool's logo on your integrations page is fine, implying the vendor endorses your product when they do not is not. Second, if you are embedding the mark in a UI, prefer an SVG so it stays crisp at any size, and keep the original file rather than re-exporting a compressed copy that muddies the color.

What Semgrep is

Semgrep is an open-source static application security testing (SAST) engine. The name is a compression of "semantic grep," and that phrase is the whole idea. Traditional grep matches text patterns. Semgrep matches code patterns with awareness of the language's structure, so a rule can say "find calls to this function where the argument is user-controlled" rather than "find this exact string." It parses source into an abstract syntax tree and matches your rules against that tree, which means it ignores irrelevant differences like whitespace, variable names, and formatting.

The result sits in a useful middle ground. It is faster and far easier to write rules for than heavyweight dataflow engines, and it is dramatically more precise than regular expressions. A security engineer can write a custom rule in a few minutes using syntax that looks like the target language itself, which is the feature that made Semgrep popular. You do not need to learn a separate query language to express "flag any use of this dangerous API."

How the rules work

A Semgrep rule is YAML that contains a pattern written in the syntax of the language you are scanning. The ... operator matches any sequence of arguments or statements, and metavariables written like $X capture and correlate values across the pattern. A rule to flag a Python subprocess call with shell=True, a classic command-injection risk, is only a few lines, and it reads almost like the vulnerable code it targets.

Rules can go further than single expressions. Semgrep supports taint tracking, where you declare sources of untrusted input and dangerous sinks, and the engine flags any path where tainted data reaches a sink without passing through a sanitizer you have declared. This is what lets it catch injection classes rather than just banned function names. The community and Semgrep maintain a large public registry of prewritten rules covering the OWASP Top 10 and framework-specific pitfalls, so most teams start with the registry and add custom rules for their own internal APIs.

Where it fits and where it does not

Semgrep covers the SAST slice of application security: reading your own source for vulnerabilities you wrote. It does not inventory your open-source dependencies for known CVEs, that is software composition analysis, and it does not test a running application from the outside, that is dynamic testing. A complete program runs all three, because each sees bugs the others are structurally blind to.

The honest limitations are worth stating. Static analysis of this style produces false positives when a pattern looks dangerous but the surrounding context makes it safe, and false negatives when a vulnerability spans files or frameworks in ways the rule did not anticipate. Taint tracking helps but is not a full interprocedural dataflow engine. In practice this means Semgrep is excellent at enforcing "never do this specific thing" rules across a large codebase quickly, and weaker at discovering novel, deeply nested logic flaws. Used for what it is good at, banning known-dangerous patterns and encoding your organization's secure-coding standards as executable rules, it is one of the highest-leverage tools a security team can deploy.

Getting started quickly

Installation is a package install, and a first scan against a repository with the default registry rules takes one command. The output lists each finding with the file, line, the rule that fired, and a message. The immediate task after a first scan is triage, because the registry is broad and will surface findings that do not apply to you. Suppress the noise with inline nosemgrep comments or a rule-level ignore, tune the rule set down to what matters for your stack, and only then wire it into continuous integration so the pull-request pipeline blocks on the categories you have decided are non-negotiable. Teams that skip the triage step and turn on every rule at blocking severity end up with a red pipeline everyone ignores.

FAQ

Where can I download the official Semgrep logo?

From Semgrep's own brand or press page, which publishes the mark in correct colors with usage rules and light and dark variants. Avoid scraping the image from third-party sites, which usually gives you a low-resolution or incorrectly colored copy.

Can I use the Semgrep logo on my own site?

For factual, non-misleading uses like an integrations listing or a comparison, generally yes, subject to the vendor's trademark guidelines. Do not recolor or distort the mark, and do not use it in a way that implies endorsement you do not have.

Is Semgrep free?

Semgrep has an open-source core that is free to run, plus a commercial platform with additional features. The open-source engine and the public rule registry cover most single-team needs.

Does Semgrep replace software composition analysis?

No. Semgrep is a SAST tool that reads your own code. It does not inventory or scan your third-party dependencies for known CVEs, which is what SCA does. Run both.

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