Ensure the integrity of images throughout the lifecycle

Part of managing security throughout the container lifecycle is to ensure the integrity of the container images in the registry and as they are altered or deployed into production.

  • Images with vulnerabilities, even minor, should not be allowed to run in a production environment. Ideally, all images deployed in production should be saved in a private registry accessible to a select few. Keep the number of production images small to ensure that they can be managed effectively.
  • Because it’s hard to pinpoint the origin of software from a publicly available container image, build images from the source to ensure knowledge of the origin of the layer. When a vulnerability surfaces in a self-built container image, customers can find a quicker path to a resolution. With a public image, customers would need to find the root of a public image to fix it or get another secure image from the publisher.
  • A thoroughly scanned image deployed in production is not guaranteed to be up-to-date for the lifetime of the application. Security vulnerabilities might be reported for layers of the image that were not previously known or were introduced after the production deployment.
  • Periodically audit images deployed in production to identify images that are out of date or have not been updated in a while. You might use blue-green deployment methodologies and rolling upgrade mechanisms to update container images without downtime. You can scan images by using tools described in the preceding section.
  • Use a continuous integration (CI) pipeline with integrated security scanning to build secure images and push them to your private registry. The vulnerability scanning built into the CI solution ensures that images that pass all the tests are pushed to the private registry from which production workloads are deployed.
  • A CI pipeline failure ensures that vulnerable images are not pushed to the private registry that’s used for production workload deployments. It also automates image security scanning if there’s a significant number of images. Otherwise, manually auditing images for security vulnerabilities can be painstakingly lengthy and error prone.

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